what acupuncture feels like

A friend asked what acupuncture feels like, but I don’t know what it might feel like to you. I can only try to explain what it feels like to me.

You have to understand that I wake up every day with my skin screaming for touch. I live the life of the skin-hungry, and this drought withers the mind and the heart as well as the body. 

So, acupuncture. Sixteen or so sometimes-symmetrical precision points of touch that I don’t feel touching me at all, so small are they. But my body knows they’re there, and in fifteen or twenty minutes, it’s the strangest sensation, like dreaming while awake, a vibration runs through all the barren places, all the far-out peninsulas of my body, a vibration that feels like warm water thawing out ice, or like greenery coming back to barren lands. Today, even though I knew my arms were by my sides, for a while I could have sworn they were reaching straight out in either direction. It felt like floating, like expansion, like a memory of homecoming. 

Always a memory. Always the same memory, and never nearly as good as the real thing. A tune-up when what I need is an overhaul. Metallic pinpricks that work their own valuable kind of magic but I still need the particular magic of human touch.

See, what I only just realized today is that when I left your apartment that night all those years ago, and took the bus to the subway home to my little fortress of solitude, it wasn’t, as I had thought for so long, the world that was vibrating around me. It was me, at the age of 37, alive and awake for the very first time.