Today I had my first “flirtation with mask” since the onset of Covid. Is that a thing—FWM?

I took a break from our affresco class to get a bite to hold me until lunch, and as I was waiting in line outside the little grocery store around the corner from our lab, this guy walked up and got in line behind me. I turned to acknowledge him, or I did something, and he said something, and we looked at each other—of course, with masks—and for the first time since this face-covering shit began (it makes me really ask how civilizations that cover their faces all the time even manage and why?) my eyes and those of a man I don’t know clicked in some kind of way. Interest. Curiosity. Natural liking. The things that make up flirtation. He had curly sandy blond hair and brown eyes and was maybe in his mid-40s. He was wearing a red T-shirt and behind the mask I imagine a playful smile.

It was finally our turn to go into the store where we continued to check each other out while the store owners and clerks were asking us what we wanted, etc., and then inevitably I had to go, and he had to go, and then we stared at each other from across the street while I sat on a stoop to eat my little pre-lunch, like a kid. But then he left with what I imagine being a smile and vanished. Later, I went back to the store to ask about him and learned that he was a courier for some company, and I also learned that he asked the store owners if they knew who I was. They told him they thought I was a professor at the Accademia (haha).

It was a brief, ephemeral human encounter that got me thinking that it would be fun to love someone again (well, on the fence on that, still). To fall in love. To give one’s self away to someone. To merge my life with someone else’s again. But then I realized that in times of Covid what would one even do? How do you go about wanting to kiss someone? I have not felt the inclination for a while—longer than I care to tell—but what does one do? Say, “Can you get a Covid test, please?” I lived through the times where we used to say, “You should be tested for AIDS.” And now this. What does your mouth even look like?

The whole process of considering this got me thinking that it is easier to not deal with it at all. It is so much easier to just avoid it all. To never be seen naked again. To never let someone really look at you. I barely look at myself naked anymore. I don’t even shave anymore (well, I do, for my own self-respect). And it breaks my heart. Where have I gone? Where have my beautiful legs gone? And my back? And stomach? Are they still there for me – for anyone – to see?

My emotional vulnerability and the awareness of my emotional undoing are like creeping vines crawling into the crevasses of my body and soul and tearing them apart fiber by fiber. I don’t know how to deal with any of it anymore. Do not smile at me too long, for I will cry. Do not touch me or hold my hand for I will weep. Do not hold me or run your hands up and down my skin for I will collapse to the ground and die. Every contact is a reminder of the contact not had and the starvation of my soul.

Indeed, sometimes here when I walk away from any form of human contact that is even in the slightest form affectionate—a reach of a hand or the kindness of a look in a store—I feel like bursting out in tears like the most uncommon and penetratingly miraculous thing in my life just happened and leaving it is inappreciably painful. My heart melts at the slightest of real human anything … communality? Being human and vulnerable together? Because at the end of the day I know that it does not transport home to me. A combination of Covid and being in a new place that is almost impossible to beat.

I never thought—with all the disarming, absolutely naked deep physical relationships I have had, and affectionate contact throughout my life, sitting arm in arm with my friends or on each other’s laps at the fountain or at the bar in Cetona, and lovers, lovers I will never have again—that this could be. That my ease of touch would retreat like a frightened spider. The confidence of running a finger along someone’s face or arm or hand or spine. The other day I ran my hand along the cheek of a beautiful classmate of mine, Irfan, a stunning young man, as a gesture of affection—a simple human gesture—and it felt audacious and possibly misunderstood. It was something that I used to be so familiar with and absolutely confident in its being and solidity and meaning, and now … The incredibly transporting and sure sensuality of touch between my skin and that of another has become a mystery. I do not even know what holding someone’s hand feels like anymore. Running a finger along someone’s face—or, even more, someone touching my face … I am broken by this. I cannot recognize it as my life. And I want to rebel, but I do not know how.

I feel my smile stolen, my last edges of youth stolen and taken, my expression of myself to others in a new town stolen, my ability to get to know others stolen. And it cannot ever be gotten back. Ever. Ever. Ever.

And this brings me to a final consideration that makes this pointedly grievous beyond the temporary. As girls and then women, all of our lives we dissect ourselves to find what is wrong or inadequate, with the support of many helpers—not only men. In Cetona the girls were much worse than the boys. And indeed, we let the most perfect—the only perfect—years of our lives as girls go by in the nefarious shadow of critique. IN adolescence it is some imperfection or the other—an imperfect nose. And then we turn 25 and it’s cellulite—even when it does not even exist. And then the wrinkles start. And then something else. We become increasingly beautiful and yet less and less so to our own eyes as the pressure of life tells us this is so. And then with age we realize that this was all in our minds; that indeed we were beautiful—and still are—but we just didn’t believe it. And the game continues. Until it ends, for real.

Sometimes I look at myself in a mirror and I think that I will die like this. That I will never be any more beautiful than this, and yet will never be seen again. That this is all that will ever be. In some ways it is absolute and remarkable lucky abundance. In some others … damn you, Covid, for stealing from me. Stealing even me from me.