It’s hard to know where we begin and end.

From afar, we make a first impression with the clothes we wear; our hair and makeup, the style we cut, can reach across a room. Or maybe we hear each other first, and it’s the blend of bass and treble in a greeting or a laugh that make our entrance. Closer still, and we exude a scent, for better or worse. But touch someone, and make no mistake, you’ve made contact.

The power of touch can animate, irritate, thrill, injure, pacify, soothe, and bind us. In her Field Note, “I Miss Touching My Patients,” in the Fall 2020 issue of Intima, the Pediatrics resident Kajsa Vlasic mourns the loss of high fives and shoulder squeezes wrought by COVID-19. After her supervising physician advises her to limit her contact with the patients she examines, she finds herself reflexively withdrawing her gloved hand when a child absentmindedly plays with it. “I crave rocking the babies, fist-bumping my third-graders…and sitting close as my teenagers share honest and intimate details of their lives.” Before stethoscopes were invented, doctors placed their ears on patients’ chests. Now, a foot and a half of rubber tubing feels too close for comfort.

The intimacy of touch is deeply rooted in vulnerability, and COVID-19 is reminding us that this vulnerability is biological as well as emotional. For Dr. Vlasic, touch was an act of trust, but nowadays trust seems best measured by how far apart we stand and how carefully we obscure the lower half of our faces.

In medical school, my classmates and I learned anatomy on individuals who had entrusted us with their whole bodies after death. The scope of this gift was overwhelming and humbling, and in my poem, “To a Body Donor,” also in the Fall 2020 issue, I describe how, out of instinct, we tried to express our gratitude with gentleness. Though we knew our donors felt nothing, we still fretted about inflicting pain. Once, after a morning of dissection, without precisely knowing why, I laid my hand on our donor’s forehead before replacing his shroud. He had given himself to our school so that we might someday become doctors, and looking back, I think I was trying to learn how to touch my patients as doctors do—to bless, to thank, to heal, and to move on from what cripples us in any way we can, together.

Adam Lalley MD is an Emergency Medicine resident at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn and a graduate of the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. He is a winner of the Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Award, hosted by Baylor College of Medicine, and the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition, hosted by Northeast Ohio Medical University. His short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction have been featured in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Narrateur: Reflections on Caring, the Journal of Medical Humanities and The Eagle and the Wren Reading Series. He was a finalist in the 2020 NYACP Story Slam and is working on a book-length work of non-fiction about how patients find meaning in illness. Learn more at adamlalley.com and @AdamLalley on Twitter. His poem “To a Body Donor” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.