I don't know what the word is for when you only speak one language. But that is me. Except I used to know another. I used to be tactile. To be affectionate. I would talk expressively and often touch the person with whom I was communicating.
My heart has always loved deeply and quickly and recklessly. Or perhaps not recklessly because I have an innate and unquestionable sense of people. My feel for others is so intuitive and natural it is like breathing. Just moments with someone and I can judge their essence and it's compatibility with mine.
For as long as I can remember I have been open, gregarious and extroverted. It is the strangest thing to take someone so open, so tactile, so loving - with networks of friends that overlap and stretch for miles - and shove them into a house and refuse them contact with the outside world. To isolate and alienate them until you almost break them.
I do have a keyboard I touch, but I do not touch you. I have lost my language of affection and I didn't even know I had it. Nor how fluent I was in it. It was probably my first language really. It was before I spoke that I touched. Now it is like a mysterious old ritual, long forgotten and unused. So it has become awkward and necessarily thought out to remember the customs of the language of affectionate interaction. Now I have seizures at the merest contact or even whiff of chemicals in my environment.
It is as though the perfect torture was crafted for someone like me. To give someone so tactile, so loving, so affectionate an affliction that disallows contact.
That is why I fight. From here. Behind they keyboard. It's also why I give you glimpses of my suffering. Of my torture. So that you might fight with me. It's not enough that the sick have to fight their illness and fight for help. So I provoke you with my suffering. I hope to inspire in you a burning desire to fight for injustice. And to see the courage of my people. My community of warriors.
All the while I type on this keyboard, automatically clicking my fingers on keys, still able to touch type.... just unable to touch you. My heart is heavy with longing for the squishes and bear hugs I used to give out daily. The brushes on somebody's arm in reassurance, the squeeze of the hand, the kiss on the cheek or the light tight cuddle of a child's arms around you as you scoop them up.
Still I fight from here. Separated from you by the walls. But every now and then there is no hiding it. The weight of the grief in my heart. Because without fail every time I see a group of people on my TV screen I cry. Sometimes it's silent tears streaming down my face, other times I sob. I miss the collective.
You are the collective. You can change everything. Help me fight. Stand up for my people. We can't do it without you.
To see what it looks like when I am exposed to the teeniest minimal contact with the outside world, follow this link:
http://youtu.be/gPbb8DZdY7M
To fight for us. To support our Thunderclap and make it roar, follow this link:
https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/10276-me-cfs-fibro-mcs-change-for-me
