Lately, when I find myself reaching for my phone for a distraction, it’s no longer just to mindlessly swipe through Instagram stories and semi-ironically decipher my horoscope. Instead, I catch myself constantly returning to my camera roll. In particular, the photos where I’m touching my family and friends.

There’s the fuzzy Christmas party set of my colleagues and I, all cheek to cheek, craning our heads to get in a series of group selfies. There’s a backyard family lunch, me with my arm slung over my mum’s shoulder. There’s a day at the beach with my sister and her kid, us each holding a hand as we drag her back to the car. And there’s Mardis Gras night. It was just a few weeks ago but today the photos feel as though they belong in a history book. Friends and strangers covered in glitter and sweat, dancing close at a street party, arms wrapped around waists, exuberant kisses being planted on faces, all of us joyfully, drunkenly close to each other and vigorously engaged in whatever the opposite of social distancing is.

I’m experiencing a new and very wholesome kind of thirst.

As the coronavirus crisis deepens, we are moving further and further away from each other. If we’re lucky enough to still have a job, we are mostly working from home. The latest wave of lockdown restrictions have made seeing friends and family outside the home almost impossible (unless you’re wearing activewear). Even the physical proximity of strangers has evaporated. We leave bigger and bigger gaps as we pass on the street and step back from each other in the supermarket. If you live alone, it might be weeks since you touched another person, and months before you will again.

One of the greatest paradoxes of this moment is most of us are feeling more tender and afraid than we ever have, and want nothing more than to pull close the people we love, to seek reassurance and comfort. Yet, for the first time in our lives, unless we live together, we can’t do this – not physically, at least.

My niece has to be physically restrained from barrelling out of the house towards visitors

This is all the sadder because touch – when it’s wanted, when it’s caring – is so good for us. It connects us to each other. It is our most primal form of communication. Years of research suggests it’s beneficial for our physical and mental health, lifting our mood and decreasing stress. Newborn babies thrive on skin-to-skin contact. Every kid knows the power of “kissing it better” when you get hurt, or being patted off to sleep by a reassuring hand.

Adults too can experience a true “skin hunger” when they go long periods without touch, as the illustrator Kristen Radtke explored in the New York Times this week.

Right now though most of us are so wary of touch, even of hugging our parents.

I saw my mum last week and she moved towards me on pure instinct, her arms out. I jumped back, like a teenager about to get an embarrassing goodbye kiss at the school gate. We may yet all need to do what the mother of the ABC journalist Emilia Terzon did last week – building ingenious protective “cuddle suits” out of garbage bags so they could give each other a squeeze.

Even one of the most familiar rituals in most families – greeting returning loved ones at the airport with wide open arms – is impossible now. Last week my sister, her wife and their three-year-old daughter arrived home from New York after beating a hasty retreat from their life in a city rapidly descending into a public health nightmare. They have another baby due in a couple of months. No one could even go to the airport to meet them, let alone embrace them.

When I have seen them, it is with a gulf between us. I drop groceries and bottles of wine on the stoop of the Airbnb where they are quarantining, then retreat back to the front gate to sit out on the footpath when my sister comes to the door.

My niece has to be physically restrained from barrelling out of the house towards visitors. A champion hugger, hair-messer and tickler, not being able to be physical with her grandparents, extended family or friends means she has become exponentially more handsy with her mums. “She crawls at the walls, she crawls on us,” my sister says.

With all this touch deprivation, the most common wish I see expressed among people on social media is to hug their friends and family when this is all over. That is unless you’ve been forced into celibacy, in which case you’re naturally concerned with another kind of physical intimacy.

“The world is going to be an intense cuddle puddle on the streets,” my friend Que Minh Luu tweeted last week. “It’ll be like that iconic end of the world war photo, except with active consent.”

When this is over, I for one cannot wait to go HAM on all my friends. I daydream about the first dancefloor we can get on, wrapping them up and smooshing their faces. I will never not let my mum hold my hand again, no matter where we are. I will let my toddler niece use me as a human climbing gym and I look forward to nibbling on the fat little legs of her new sibling. If everyone I love makes it through this, I want to put my arms around them all. We’ll need it.

