When Words Touch Deeper Than Hands

It wasn't the touch that gave him goosebumps. It was the sentence before it. Three words, spoken quietly, almost casually. And I noticed something open up in him.

I often think about how little we take language seriously. How we treat it as a means to an end — packaging for something that only becomes real through the body. But that's not true. Language isn't the packaging. Language is the gift itself.

A word at the right moment is more intimate than any gesture. It assumes that someone has been listening.

In my world, where the energy that builds between two people is often very physical, I've learned that the strongest moments are rarely the loudest. It's the silence after a sentence. It's the pause in which someone waits, because they know their words are still echoing. That is power.

I've seen people moved to tears by a single, perfectly placed sentence. Because it landed so precisely that it hurt. In the best possible way.

What Language Can Do That Hands Cannot

Hands can warm, hold, guide. That's not nothing. But hands cannot speak into your interior. They cannot name what you yourself haven't put into words. A person who can do that — who finds language for what is silent in you — has access to something deeper than your body would ever allow.

That is what fascinates me. The ability, in a conversation, in a message, in a single evening, to speak in such a way that someone goes home carrying one sentence with them for days.

Whoever truly wants to touch you first learns your language.

I believe that's also why writing for me was never just communication. It is approach. Every time I begin a text, I move a little closer to someone. I choose words. Deliberately. Attentively. In the hope that the person reading feels that I am telling something of myself here.

xoxo Aya

Originally published in German on the Miss Aya Amsterdam Blog:
→ Read the original (German)