Really early on this year I learnt something strange about myself, that when someone I know how to touch dies, my hands mourn.
Dudge died before he got to my promised massage and I found that my hands could feel him. Were mapping out how to touch him, could feel were to pull back and how to stroke and smooth. I thought it was because he and I had had specific plans for him to get a massage that first game back in the field and that this strangely physical mourning was happening because it had suddenly just not happened.
But today I heard that a semi-regular, one of the chronically ill people on that field who sometimes found that my hands could provide some pain relief had passed away. My hands, not planning anything for her curved as if they were trying to soothe her pain.
Far too late to soothe anyone and my hands grieve.
I don’t know how my body is going to react when one of my lovers passes. I strongly suspect it may feel quite traumatic.
Today though I’m having a cry and letting my hands mourn for a body that I knew in that strange between knowing and loving that LARP leaves you with. Emotionally true, physically true, yet lacking all the context of real life relationships.