Skin needs to feel

This one is about wanting to feel everything, but escaping the pain.
About needing the world to release the right sensation deep within.
Because skin needs to feel it!
But please, skip the pain!

One of the few classical German writers I ever liked to read once asked in one of his poems where he was supposed to find flowers when it was winter, and the struggle described here is constantly reaching me on new levels. Friedrich Hölderlin, one of the odd ones of the German literature in the late 18th century, titled this poem (how I would translate it), „Half of a life“, and to me it grasps the deep desire to feel everything (read “Hälfte des Lebens” by Friedrich Hölderlin here).

But is it even possible to feel everything? Sometimes, I view life as a quest of sensations I do not want to miss. As songs to be sang, as tastes to be tried. As kisses to be dared, and as summer rain to be welcomed with a thunder!

And then there are moments which I do not want to feel. Moments, I can barely navigate myself through, because they cause a feeling I don‘t know where to put, and they make something inside of me cry like a little child, and even those belong into this quest of sensations I have just described.

„But at least you have a unicorn!“, my witch teases me tonight while stealing my last ice cream. „a Unicorn that waits outside with you for hours if not days once you crawl inside and cry like a Baby again.“
She is right about that. We are lucky witches. Not everyone is granted such a unicorn!

Being alive is balancing between these two options, while so many things are out of our control and just keep coming upon us.

Have you ever stood on a field in the middle of winter and wished for a flower or for the sun on your skin with all your heart, knowing that there would be months without? It breaks the heart, but it is the most natural thing. It is alright that neither the sun nore the flowers are there for us, because winter has to be.
It is alright for a thing we so desperately need to feel not to be there for us.
Does this break your heart? It does break mine. Or, at least cause seasonal depression.
Whatever to call it.
And have you ever been fearing an appointment, maybe a painful doctor‘s visit, knowing that it just had to be done, but also knowing not to be ready the slightest to make it through? And it‘s still alright for the world to force this upon us. And so, on a rainy Tuesday Morning, you find yourself with a needle in your arm, burning like hell while draining your blood and you feel emotional unable to wait for whatever results will come.

Skin needs to feel, but please universe, grant me something else? And if not, we summon another witching dream, tricking our mind into feeling something not real? With just the right chemicals released somewhere to warm up this starving skin?

„The needle you faced today was neither necessary nor encouraged by anyone else than you“, my witch giggles and I make a face at her.
Once again, this little ice-cream-stealing creature of the night was right, though.
I tried to get over my fear of having someone done things to my body, today, and I didn‘t get there, but I got far. Situations, in which someone is coming at me and I have to hold still constantly trigger a lot of traumatic memories. To make that stop, I figured that getting a piercing would be an interesting experience. When I was a curious teenager, I already had my nostril pierced, but lost the hole when taking the piercing out for a surgery.
„I have been missing it ever since“, I explain this to my witch once more. „So, I thought asking for pain and getting something I deeply wanted in return would help me control my panic.“
We will see about that. I am not done trying, but I also haven‘t been brave enough, yet.

Putting myself through something I do not want to feel to be getting something I really want to sense in return sounds like a good deal, right?
Going through with it would always be a symbol of accepting the struggle I have just described.
But can it ever really be accepted?

Can pain ever be welcomed in return for the flowers and the sun to return, because skin so desperately needs to feel?