The plastic balls on their track dig their way through the mottled arguments in my back the way your hands never could. Instead, your fingers wander delicately, water spiders testing the surface tension of skin.
Breath gets caught in nets when you touch me. Your hands suspend possibilities, erratic opportunity, from thin strands of silk. You spin the stories that make the hair on my shoulders stand, the warmth behind my thighs vanish.
This is a different approach to touch. The impersonal kneading, the shovel that whirs my muscles into soil for some new crop. There are no mysteries here, no chance an old hurt will cave under the automated pressure the way they might under a tongue, a nail.