Intimacy
I think its horrendously ironic that the two people that I feel the most intimate with are people who I cannot be physically intimate with.
The first person is someone who I’ve known longer than anyone under the age of 30 should know someone they’re not related to. We’ve been there for each other. We each understand each other better than we understand ourselves. The time we’ve spent talking together is measured in months if not years. But, well she’s a she. And married.
The second person is someone who in comparison to the first I’ve only known for a blink of an eye. We met at a time we were both searching for something more in life. While we never spent a whole lot of time together before he moved a vacation where he was my host solidified our relationship in my mind.
I was reading Leave Myself Behind by Bart Yates and he has this beautiful passage on intimacy (p 56):
What can you say about loneliness except that it sucks? Most of the time I’m okay, but every once in a while I wake up in the morning and I’m so lonely I can’t stand it. I can hug Hoover till hell freezes over and it helps some but it doesn’t take away the ache of wanting another human being to hold.
…
Maybe physical intimacy isn’t always about touching. Maybe it’s also about being able to sit next to someone at dinner and not care if he takes something off your plate or reaches across you for the salt. Maybe it’s about being able to sprawl out on the floor and read a book in the same room with someone who’s grading papers and muttering about ‘incompetent boobs who couldn’t write a good paper if their lives depended on it.’ Maybe it’s about sharing the same space with another person and not going fucking crazy because you can’t get away from them.
That’s it. I guess: true intimacy is really just the run of the mill, day to day stuff that happens without thinking — thousands of simple, meaningless, comfortable ways you can be close to someone never dreaming how shitty you’ll feel when you wake up one morning with all of it gone.
That is the closest description I can find about how I feel when I’m with him. But for reasons that I wish were inconsequential we’ll have to stop.