No. 12 | Huidhonger
A Dutch word that describes a universal, but also intensely personal, pandemic experience
The Dutch have a word for it: huidhonger.
Skin hunger: the need for physical touch, especially in those who are alone for a long time, such as in quarantine or self-isolation.
The word sits between huidcontact (skin-to-skin contact) and huisquarantine (home quarantine) in the Coronawoordenboek, an online list of Dutch words invented to describe this strange new reality.
I wonder why the word fascinates me, for while others are languishing in loneliness, I am never alone.
I have all the affection I could possibly want: a child who rains wet kisses on my face every morning, a husband who enfolds me in his arms at night, when we fall asleep with limbs entwined, exchanging breaths. They look to me for security, lean on me for strength, and hold me tight for relief from stress and anxiety.
Huidhonger. The longing for physical contact in isolation. I don’t know what that’s like.
But he does.
I haven’t been touched by another human being in months, he tells me over the phone. He, who thrives on affection and gives of it with such joy and abandon. I just miss people! And hugs!
Meanwhile, I am drowning in my family’s touch, engulfed by their need. My body is a well of comfort they draw from at all hours of the day. I give them everything I have; is there any other choice?
To break the unrelenting sameness of our days, we agree to meet for a long walk in a silent, empty city. It’s the first time I see anyone outside my family—anyone in real life, in fact, beyond the protective screen of a phone or laptop—and the first time I see him with a full beard since we met last winter. We escape a crowded park for quiet side streets, stealing through secret courtyards where spring’s first magnolias bloom for no one.
The distance makes me tense and guarded; 1,5 meters is wider than most people think. How strange it is to want to be close together, yet force ourselves to remain apart. Does he notice how I kept dancing around him? Darting ahead, stepping to the side, falling behind, my feet tracing invisible lines around the space between us, policing boundaries on a sunset stroll that feels both like a dangerous risk and an exquisite freedom.
We return to the park, lingering at our bicycle locks as the evening fades from rose gold to dull lilac. I wonder whether the curls of his beard might feel soft and fine or bristly and coarse under my fingertips.
Before we say goodbye he asks: What about you? What do you miss most about normal life?
My answer is immediate. Sweaty stranger bodies.
He is almost visibly repelled, which makes me laugh. I don’t share that with you at all.
I know, I say. That’s just me.
They come for me that night, the sweaty stranger bodies.
They shake me awake at four in the morning with a craving for that dark pounding womb, where dancing shadows once flung the salt of their sweat onto my lips, where ecstatic specters once crushed the musk of their skin into my nostrils, on smoky pulsating nights I thought would never end but now may never have again. They wrench me from bed and drag me to the living room couch, where I scour my phone for all the videos I’ve ever secretly filmed in clubs. I play and replay every last one until sunrise, listening for the command of the bass and the murmur of shared secrets swirling above layered rhythms.
I search for myself on distant dance floors where my freedom was boundless and absolute, in another life, when my body was my own and access to it was only mine to give or withhold.
I try to lose myself in everything I’d forgotten I’d lost, until he reminded me that I had lost it.
In the end I fail, because oblivion can’t be found in a flickering screen. And because hunger, once awakened, will never be satisfied with anything other than what it wants.
The next morning I send him a photo I took of him at the park.
Quarantine beard, week five, I write. Don’t shave it off just yet.
Why not?
So I can push your face down and feel it between my legs.
For a split second after I hit send, I feel guilty. Shouldn’t I be content with what I have in such abundance?
Yet what I long for is not affection nor contact nor touch, but permission. To be allowed to shed the weight of my skin and granted the freedom to slip into another, even if only for a night.
Huidhonger demands to be fed, even if it craves the same thing for different reasons. Perhaps, in some safe space between our swiftly shifting worlds, two hungers might find a way to satisfy one another.
His reply pings on my phone.
When I wrote Huidhonger
I wrote this in the earliest days of the pandemic, when the experience of being sealed off in our homes and domestic lives was bizarre, new and fraught with anxiety. I was also undergoing serious withdrawal from the ecstatic communion, intensity and freedom that I found on the dance floor.
I envy writers who’ve actually had the time and mental space to write about their experiences of the pandemic during the pandemic. How…?!?! Because I’m only starting to make sense of mine now, as we slowly emerge from it.
I’m still understanding how the pandemic affected my personal autonomy, sexuality and relationships, and in turn, how my personal autonomy, sexuality and relationships helped me cope with the pandemic. As a wife and mother in a polyamorous relationship, I’m in an unusual position, so there is plenty to reflect on.
I think I’ll be in here, trying to understand it for a long while.
How Huidhonger became visual
These images were created in collaboration with Conor Vella. When I told Conor about this word I had discovered and what it represented, it caught fire in his creative (and visual) mind. Thus a collaboration was born: twin creative expressions of the same idea, two sides of the same experience. One verbal, one visual.
This is what huidhonger looks like from his perspective. I wonder: what does huidhonger look like to you?
Why I’m sharing Huidhonger now
Shortly after I published my post-pandemic reflections, the reopening of nightlife in the Netherlands —combined with the spread of the Delta variant and a low vaccination rate among youth—closed down the thing I had been looking forward to the most (apart from traveling and seeing family again), which was returning to the dance floor for the very experience that I wrote about in Huidhonger.
And so I find myself back in that space of craving. How are we back here again, one year later?
Perhaps this is another kind of dance: a dance with the unknown. Perhaps we can all learn to find our freedom, dancing as long as the music plays.
Thank you for reading!
As always, I love to hear your thoughts, reflections, and questions. I do always feel a little vulnerable after sharing work that is intense and personal, so I would be happy to receive a reply from you.
Letters by Deepa will take a break for the month of August. See you in September with new adventures, stories and reflections. Have a beautiful summer and stay safe!
Beautiful work Deeps
I hadn’t heard of huidhonger.. your writing has put it in a different light. A craving. Thanks for sharing Deepa.