The Distance You Never Cross

Press your palm flat to the table. It feels solid, final — skin meeting wood, no gap. There is a gap. There is always a gap, and you have never once in your life closed it.

Every atom is wrapped in a haze of electrons, all of them negatively charged. Like charges push apart, and the closer they come the harder they shove, the force climbing without limit. So when your hand comes down, the electrons in your skin and the electrons in the wood refuse each other. They never meet. What you feel as touch is that refusal — a force held a hair's breadth away, reported to the nerves in your fingertips as pressure.

You have never touched the table. You have never touched another person. A hand held in yours is electrons in your skin shoving electrons in theirs, across a space neither set will ever cross. The kiss, the handshake, the cat against your leg — fields, not surfaces. Pressure without contact.

You have spent your whole life a fraction of a fraction of a millimetre away from everything you have ever held.

And if you have never touched anything — have you ever truly felt it?