I just had a beautiful young woman holding and touching my hands, standing very close to me, speaking softly in an unidentified (to me) accent…
…as part of a sales pitch. She was selling some skin care products from a kiosk in the mall.
She talked about exfoliation, and dry skin, and showed me the difference between my right hand, which had been treated with her lotion, and my left hand, which had not.
I recognized the sales pitch, and felt a brief pang of guilt at wasting her time. Yet I allowed it to unfold just because I feel, still feel, skin-hunger, a desire for simple human touch.
Upon reflection I know that there is only a little difference from the sales transaction that I was a part of (but ultimately declined) and the transaction that takes place in a strip club. She did not choose me out of the crowd because I’m smart, or sexy, or successful, or for my talent of writing. She chose me to offer me a trade: my money for her little blue bottles from Israel, “near the Dead Sea,” she claimed.
I draw a link between that short social intercourse at the mall and my sojourns into Devil’s Point and sharing time with Stormy… and, too, I see a parallel with the spam that fills my inbox, whose subject lines speak of visceral desires and physical needs in the hope of making a sale.
And it saddens me.
It saddens me not simply because I’m subject to the come-on, the come-hither, the c’mere. It saddens me because I seek it out. I don’t simply tolerate it – I’ve convinced myself that it’s my only recourse.
I want to be magnetic. I want to be attractive. I want to be needed.
I am, however, only pliable. I am merely gullible. I find myself needy.