I shared pages, as they say (those of us who make poems say it anyway) with Gabriel Hardman in the just published Fall-Winter 2026-27 issue of Intima. His poem “Skin,” which is about, among other things, pulling a bandage back on the wound of a young patient with old scars, comes right before my poem “Slippery,” which is about, among other things, a patient being given a bed bath.

The speaker in “Skin” says: “I am wearing gloves, but can feel their skin./ It feels like my skin.”

The speaker in “Slippery” says: “I remember my illness fondly / as a time when my illusions / about just about everything / were gently set aside…”

The illusion that we are separate (and it is an illusion, as some of my favorite spiritual texts argue) is but a dream. “Life is but a dream,” a frightening, vast dream of separation—separate bodies, separate minds, in a world of separateness—that we all yearn to awaken from. Your skin feels like my skin, leads to, I am like you. And I am like you, if we follow it to where it inevitably must lead us, leads to: I AM you. We are one.

We are not separate, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. While interpreting recently for a DeafBlind woman in a memory-care facility (I make my living as an ASL interpreter), I had this experience, this epiphany, this Holy Instant:

In her dementia, in her hospital bed, she was drowning in the vast shallows of the bedsheets, which were tangled round her legs from all her kicking and scissoring, as though she were trying to swim to the other shore. I watched her briefly, and I thought to myself: That could be me. And then I thought: That will be me… in how many years? And then I thought: No, that IS me. I am you. And I took her hands in my hands, and I pulled us ashore. I signed into her hand that it was me, Paul, her interpreter. And she smiled, because even in her dementia and confusion, she recognized me, remembered me, my name, the feel of my skin on her skin. In that instant, slippery though it was, I felt briefly, though intensely, that there is no separation.

Paul Hostovsky makes his living as a sign language interpreter in the Boston area, often working in the city's medical centers and hospitals. His poems and stories appear widely online and in print. Discover more of his work. His poem “Slippery” appears in the Fall-Winter 2026 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine