anti:freeze

(rough) notes toward an essay about technology, networks, wi-fi, sensuality, and touch.

I.

Making collages for you. Fingertips dragged through glue, spreading my prints across the glossy surface of the paper. Tiny ridges in skin, pressing. The archaeologist digs a fossilized footprint from the earth, and the shape of absence - negative space - transforms into object, a mold in which to pour speculation, evidence. My shed skin dried in hard glue, bacteria from my lips, on my fingertips, dragged along the edge of the paper, where skin cuts open and bleeds. Hemoglobin and plasma on your letter, leaked from me. What is more intimate than this?

Sending the letter. If you scrape your finger under the envelope flap, you are sticking your finger between my lips, letting my tongue run over you. Imagine the shed cells from a tastebud (the same tastebud that said bitter when it scraped across the seal?), the bacteria, the bits of teeth broken off. In the fold between your fingers.

II.

Touch. I am afraid I am losing my sense of touch.

I snap pictures with my cell phone, never winding film into the camera, never sliding paper into developer solution, or shuffling a stack of glossy prints. Deck of cards, joint of right thumb pressing down. Haven't heard that sound in years. I bluetooth the images to my computer, where they appear on a flat screen, ready for manipulation - but manipulation without touch. Files shrink, and I don't even have to snip. Chiropractor without hands, surgery without instruments.

This is why I love my Lomo more. Moving parts, vaguely lifelike. Compartments, hidden spaces. The shutter clicks, light splashes onto exposed film, and there is no going back. No delete. Touch with all the risk intact. And old record albums - I love those, too - with their ridges. Needle scraping the surface of a vinyl fingerprint, pops and cracks like no other disc in existence. A forensics of music. When we lose touch, we lose evidence.

III.

In the cafe, a bulletin board that says Starbucks Happenings across the top. Cork with a wood frame and glass cover, polished so the lights reflect bright. It's the glass that captures my attention - not the poster beneath. Smooth surface for a fingerprint. Sweet smudges of maple frosting, stuck to my fingers from a scone. I can look, but I can't touch. I can't press a poster against the cork, force a staple through the spongy surface, a tack. Passive as a radio antenna, a receiver that can't send a signal.