Take my hand in your own. Feel that. That warmth, skin, nails, grooves and roughness amid the faint damp. I feel yours.
Now, place your other hand on this table. Feel that. Cool wood, polish, grain, smooth bead of wax, slight gouging from a thousand forks and plates being scraped and replaced. My hand, this table, the clothes across your skin, the glasses over your nose, the air. You are in contact with none of it. Thin space distances you from everything around you. An impassable gap. Because orbiting the outermost edges of our atoms, of all atoms, are fields of electrons. Negatively charged, so the scientists have labeled. Repelling one another in their similarity. Squeeze my hand. Harder. We will never be closer than we are right now. In permanent separation. One repelling the other. You me and I you. Smash your hand into this table. You will feel pain, but you will never make contact. Your clothes will always be slightly lifted from your body. Your glasses ever hovering over that precarious bridge. Yes, all manner of energy pass between these subatomic masses. But I believe the one thing that flows through it all, the universal saturation, between worlds parallel and otherwise, is the Divine. And in that permeation, your hand touches mine, us this table.
And I am starting to believe that KNOM, flowing between transmitters, villages, ships, and vehicles, though not a deity or in any way resembling the sacred, behaves and connects in much the same way as the Omnipresent. Tune into a hotline, a music request hour, a Sounding Board. Hear the voices calling to one another across the great Alaska expanse. Listen to the station in this moment, or the next, any will do. Someone else is listening. And in that similarity, contact.
Hands merge, skin sinks into wood.
