The most popular category of ASMR video is massage 

(light touch, real person, gentle & soft) 

 

that unmissable feeling of someone’s light shadow, platonic purity, holding your hair like a 

baby’s talcum crown taking flight into silence. I’ve realised 

 

lately - my drying fingers have told me - all we want is touch, to taste it.
The clownfish and anemone just want to settle down. The neon purple padlocks 

 

on the bridge make too much sense together - metal jigsaw. We’ll claim it someday, 

if not now, playing pretend in a muffled bedroom, a loud LED glow boasting on a stray 

 

Tuesday night. The choking dark so quiet even your best receptors lie defeated. This thick cloth

of yourself, this suitcase of skin and bone, completely unrendered by the soothe, the brush, 

 

the zest of essential oil you swear you can smell through the screen. 

I moved my shelves closer together, just so they could stay in contact, 

 

even feel the smooth heart of glossed wood, a varnish the colour of a warm hug. 

I guess my skeleton is touched all the time, but people are uncomfortable with that thought. 

 

Discomfort is not a virtue, not when the epidermis is in conversation. In this long 

subdue of winter we grow cold to remind ourselves what it feels like, still and sombre, 

 

standing in the icy nose of noise. We hum all of our favourite songs, whisper lyrics 

to stale, clotted air just for the sake of knowing them. Perhaps you’ll forget, and winter 

 

has failed, collapsing into scrabbled mist. There’s couples down every corner, 

blackbirds making nests feverish in chests of drawers, even the microvertebrates, 

 

their whole world a slick puddle, even they are learning to build a home. All we want is 

the strangeness of holding one another. To be loved is a virtue. To be touched is a gift.