There are certain types of lonely.

There’s the kind of lonely that a man who calls himself Akon forced a chipmunk to sing about and the kind of lonely that a marionette bearing a not-so coincidental resemblance to a certain former North Korean leader belted out in a miniature fortress. I fall into the middle-ground category, taking in aspects of both. Lonely because I don’t have my gurl (and by “gurl”, I mean “friends, acquaintances or even the last resort family members you talk to when there is literally no one else around”, and I also mean for you to say “girl” with a bit of urban sass) by my side (and by “by my side”, I mean “within a radius that would be reasonable for me to drive to”), and also lonely because there’s nobody I can relate to – e.i. no one to dress up as the golden snitch with. So my category can be best described as the “thinking that I may continue going to remedial massage sessions because it will help my neck pain, but mostly because the full hour of human contact should quench my thirst enough to prevent me to getting weird in normal interactions” kind.

Last Friday I had the realisation that it had been five weeks since I had had a hug. I’ve read that this kind of isolation is not healthy. A magazine told me that as we become more occupational health and safety obsessed and more likely to communicate via electronic means rather than in face-to-face fashion (social media is the devil), the human race is missing out on skin-on-skin contact, and like all modern developments (computers, televisions, even those fangdangle chairs everyone seems to have these days), it’s making us fat and depressed. And I don’t mean skin-on-skin in a dirty way (I immediately imagined an extreme close up of two hairless cats rubbing up against each other, with the pale pink, wrinkled, and oily-but-still-flaky skin of one cat slowly dragging along the skin of the other’s). Just things like patting someone on the arm or even as minor as brushing up against someone on your way past. I’m stretching my memory a bit here, but this longing for touch – be it erotic, platonic or accidental – leaves a gaping hole in our hearts which become filled with food and sad R&B songs played on a loop. So as much as we may think we thrive as queens of our own little frozen kingdoms of isolation, our pesky human needs get in the way of our broad-range people hating, meaning at some point we either have to give in to tenderness or pay someone to tie us up in leather and whip us.

However, I have neither the financial resources to pay for a dominatrix experience, nor the friend-ial recourses to. As such, I have a fear that I may, either consciously or subconsciously, take the human contact by force. Just as convicts may have stolen a loaf of bread to feed their starving families, I may resort to “running into” people to feed my starving touch-receptors. I’ve already stooped to the embarrassing low of spending my weekends hovering around department stores so the staff are forced to address me, so I think it’s fair to say the threat is imminent. It might start with an innocent graze as I breeze past someone, but it may escalate to tucking of a tag back in someone’s shirt on the street, and result in a bout of “surprise trust exercises” where I stand on high surfaces and chuckle gleefully as strangers scramble to catch me.

Worse still, I may resort to asking to spot bros at the gym. I mean, I was watching Dating Naked the other night and actually thought that sharing a quad bike with a sweaty chest-haired awkward man wouldn’t be the worse thing you cold do on reality television, so who knows how much this impact my perceptions of normal behaviour. As such, I have made a mental note to book that follow up remedial massage… and to look into how pricey one of those hairless cats would be.