The Gloves I Wore When I Didn’t Want to Touch Anything

For a while, I carried a pair of thin black gloves in my handbag as if they were spare keys. They were cheap, slightly too loose at the wrists, and soft from being folded into the same inside pocket every day. I wore them when I didn’t want to touch anything: door handles, shopping trolleys, wet rails, the coins passed across a café counter.

Nobody questioned them. Melbourne gives you plenty of reasons to dress strangely. A cold morning can become a blazing afternoon by the time the tram rattles into the city, and people tend to accept a person in gloves, sunglasses and a wool coat without much fuss. I told myself the gloves were practical. The truth was more intimate. They were a small barrier between my skin and a world I had stopped trusting.

A Small Distance Between Me And The World

At first, the gloves made ordinary errands manageable. I could press the button at a pedestrian crossing, collect a parcel from the post office, or lift a basket at Woolworths without feeling that each object carried a story I didn’t want to know. The fabric gave me a few millimetres of courage.

This was before I understood that avoidance can become a ritual. I began choosing the self-checkout because there was less conversation and fewer hands involved. I kept sanitiser beside my keys, then became embarrassed by how quickly I reached for it. When someone said, “No worries,” after I apologised for not shaking hands, I heard the kindness in their voice and still kept my fingers curled.

The gloves did not make the world cleaner. They made my fear visible only to me.

What Skin Remembers

Touch has a long memory. It stores the pressure of a hand on your shoulder, the warmth of someone sitting close, the sudden withdrawal that says more than an argument. My gloves covered the fingertips that remembered too much. They softened the edges of contact, though they could never erase what had already happened.

Sometimes I wore them on the train, watching faces blur in the dark window between stations. A stranger’s coat brushed my arm and I flinched beneath the fabric. Outside, Sydney commuters hurried through the humidity with takeaway coffee sweating through cardboard cups, while I sat rigidly still, guarding my body as if it were a room I had rented to the wrong person.

I wanted a language for that feeling: the instinct to recoil before anything had touched me. Learning how to describe sensation helped me see that discomfort could be written with precision rather than hidden behind the word “fine.”

The Comfort Of Something Between

There was comfort in the gloves because they gave me a decision. I could choose when to remove them. That choice mattered more than the material itself. A woollen pair would have done the job, but mine were made from a thin synthetic knit that let the cold in. They were not protection so much as permission.

At an op shop in Fitzroy, I found a cream cardigan with pearl buttons and tried it on over my clothes. The volunteer behind the counter told me it was “a bit old-school,” which made me smile. In the mirror, I looked almost like myself. The gloves remained in my pocket, waiting for the walk home.

Clothing often tells the truth before we are ready to say it. We dress for the weather, for work, for a date, for the possibility of being seen. I dressed for distance. The gloves were an accessory for a private boundary, a quiet sign that said: please do not enter without permission.

Taking Them Off Slowly

I did not have a dramatic moment when I stopped wearing them. There was no clean break, no morning when I woke up cured of caution. Instead, the habit loosened. One afternoon, I left the gloves on a bench outside a bakery in Carlton and noticed only when I reached the next tram stop.

I considered going back. Then I looked at my bare hands. They seemed ordinary, almost unfamiliar. I bought a lamington and held the paper bag without checking whether my fingers had touched the same surface as someone else’s. It was a tiny act, but it felt like returning a key.

Later, I washed my hands at home and found that the ritual had changed. Washing was care. It was no longer punishment or proof that I had survived contact. There is a difference between protecting yourself and disappearing from your own life.

Writing The Things We Avoid

Memory rarely arrives in a neat sequence. It returns through textures: damp cotton, cold metal, the powdery smell of an old handbag. A glove can become a character in its own right, carrying the emotional weight of a season without explaining everything. That is where personal writing becomes useful. It lets an object hold what the speaker cannot yet say directly.

When I read the work of Brendolyn Marie, I recognise that movement between lived experience and creative storytelling. A relationship, a piece of clothing or an uncomfortable silence can become a doorway into something larger. The details matter because they give private feelings a physical shape.

I still keep the gloves. They are no longer in my everyday handbag; they sit in a drawer beneath scarves and old receipts. I do not hate them. They helped me through a time when touch felt like a threat, and I respect what they were trying to do. But I also know that a barrier can become a home if you are not careful.

Write about the object that carried you through a difficult season: the gloves, shoes, coat, ring or bag you could not leave behind. Send your story to Never Date a Writer and let the smallest detail speak for the life around it.