Elbows.

There is an act, an almost forgotten and at the same time disturbingly mundane gesture, that winds like an invisible thread through the fabric of human interaction, a gesture that, when performed collectively and with a certain inevitability, reveals an oppressive sense of interdependence and unspoken desperation: touching the elbow of the person next to you, a gesture that, in its apparent simplicity, reflects the charged and confused urge for connection in a world that is slowly disintegrating.

Every morning, as the day opens like a faltering, half-lit corridor of obligation, one wakes with an irrepressible sense that the body is merely a vehicle for the cyclical repetition of meaningless rituals, and yet, despite this disheartening realization, one moves through the streets, the corridors, the spaces where others move with the same dull, rehearsed movements, unaware that they are, like shadows, in a choreography, a dance of body and emptiness, a constant repetition of touch and withdrawal. And there, in that compelling moment, returning like a mechanical pulse, it happens: the elbow, slightly bent, innocent enough in its function, is touched, fleetingly and yet charged with a weight that cannot be immediately grasped, a moment in which skin, dust, and bone briefly intertwine in an unspoken despair that needs no words.

It is on the train, where the masses propel themselves forward like a breathing entity, that the touch multiplies, a chain reaction of languid fatigue and shared exhaustion, where the elbow no longer offers any resistance, but submits to the collective and the compelling logic of the moment. In conference rooms, where the air is pregnant with the dull smell of lukewarm coffee and the inescapable realization that time is only a construct, it repeats itself – the subtle, inevitable contact, a way of affirming, without wanting to, without really understanding it, that one still exists within the boundaries of a system in which individuality is slowly dissolving.

But it is especially in the evening, when one sinks into the theatre seats, surrounded by an audience that hardly recognises itself anymore, or in a café where conversations have become noise and glasses seem to be the only meaningful entities, that the touch of the elbow of the person next to one takes on something ominous, as if one were crossing a line without knowing whether there is still solid ground on the other side. For ultimately, in the repetitive, almost compulsive nature of this gesture, something is exposed that one would rather not face: that touch offers no comfort, no confirmation, no real closeness, but only an empty hold, a meagre attempt to cling to the fading awareness that there was once a time when contact meant something, when touch was not just a mechanism but a form of recognition, a helping hand towards something that has long since slipped from the collective memory.