Going anywhere

intimacies

Apr 25, 2024

Hi, this is the last essay of April. I’ll be back in May with something new <3

The orange was given to me in quarters. You served it to me on a plate. I didn’t have normal dinner but it was too late to eat anything too heavy. I put my mouth onto it. Juice instantly leaked out. Pulp laced between my teeth. With every kiss, I was sure your tongue would graze the strings. I wasn’t imagining them. I’d felt them myself.

Do you have to see someone peel an orange to know they love you? Would I know you love me in the way you peeled it? Why didn’t I smell your citrus-soaked hands after? Why didn’t I put them in my mouth? You once said you could feel that I love you in my touch. I’m glad I can be that articulate.

(These hours when I’m continuously falling in love with you. It’s still new. I’m suspicious it will feel like this for a long, long time. Let’s stay up with the full moon. You make pasta when I relent, I do need to eat. I read Annie Ernaux out loud to you on the couch. It's a passage about how she doesn’t have sex like a writer—instead, she has sex like it’s the last time every time. I closed the book. You said, that’s sort of like how you do it.)

Intimacies live in microseconds. It passes between you and another person, it isn’t held. Watching someone put a toothbrush in their mouth and lean up against the doorframe so they in turn can watch you. Hand on your knee at the restaurant. A sibling who reveals an old habit of yours to your lover, watching the recognition passing between them. Sweat gathered on their hairline, cheeks flushed and contented eyes. A letter from another person read out loud. Someone you don’t know well offering you a bite of their food or a sip from their drink. That muted sound coming from somewhere underwater or in dreams, transmitted clear enough to make out the words I love you.

I’ve been feeling my fears in my body lately. Psychosomatic or based in some reality—family history or otherwise—I’m fighting my worst ones. So I’m told to locate them somewhere. My chest. The cavity that holds these lungs that have been encrypted with complicated, faulty genetic codes. In a session, I’m instructed to press my hands to my chest and take deep breaths. I hate every second. I want it to be over as soon as it begins.

When I open my eyes, I understand why I resist any activity that requires mindful breath—yoga, being underwater, even at times synchronizing my steps on runs. For years, I’ve had to perform pulmonary function tests at quarterly check-ups for my chronic illness. It’s a test that requires a deep inhale, then a sharp exhale to measure how well my lungs are working. A number appears and I’m relieved. Every appointment this procedure is what I dread the most. Because the results are the best diagnostic of my ability to keep surviving. As luck would have it, I’ve fared well in the twenty-eight years I’ve been alive. I’m intimate with possible futures that I could have. I’m just lucky they haven’t ever become my present.

There’s precarity in my body. And I understand this precarity as the reason why most of my life, I’ve felt seconds from floating away. Some would say it’s because I’m an air sign, pre-dispositioned to be flighty. Others would just call it a character flaw. So when I ask you to lie down on top of me, I’m really asking you to ask me to stay.

In the session, I’m told some anxieties in relationships could be connected to anxieties about my illness. It makes sense. There have been moments in my life when I’ve been sick enough to get scared into thinking the sickness was a catalyst for forthcoming loss. If I had to be hospitalized, I’d lose my job, be unable to write, be away from every person and creature I love. My life as I know it would become the life of a former version of myself.

Any time the body reveals itself to be mortal is an intimacy. I think often of a line from a Margaret Ross poem: He loved someone / with a disease and held her hands / while she cried on the toilet. Intimacy isn’t always beautiful. It can be so ugly you have to look at it with half-shut eyes.

Most of my romantic partners have admitted to searching the internet about my illness at one point. They then admit how scared it makes them. Dark moments we can talk about in the light. Maybe this confession comforts me in a perverse way. It shows me that I’m loved enough to make them scared to lose me. To hope to be saved when no one and everyone can save you.

Talking about it somehow makes the gravity of the uncertainty more endurable. It’s ok to be afraid, I told you the other night. That I am more fragile than others is a truth we can freely admit to each other.

This, too, is an intimacy. But if given the choice, it’s one I’d choose to live without.

The body is positioned as a private room. Only some people are admitted entrance. Because of this, a natural order of intimacy is imposed. I would disagree with this. Intimacy doesn’t need to be scarce. It doesn’t even need to be private. It can be given freely without fear of depletion. Which makes me wonder, why do we get so embarrassed to admit we’re lousy with longing to be touched all day long?

I think people forget sex is about the entire body. When you have sex, it’s not about an end goal. It’s certainly not about touching one spot. It’s about touching every part of another person, and letting them touch you. I forget that sometimes when I get insecure around my own fallible body’s mechanics.

Now I touch for the sake of touching. I’m not touching to be touched in return. Resisting reciprocity. A free movement in both directions. I want to touch you because you’re precious. And you know I am too. The only reciprocity that I would want.

(Sometimes all we can do is laugh after. I once said you could hover your hands over my body and I would still come. I can’t help but be explicit. How does it feel like being cracked open again and again, no matter how many times we touch each other? Recently you said I knew every part of you. That intimacy I can’t explain, and I can’t let myself believe I’ve discovered every part, if I ever can.)

I used to go anywhere if someone showed me the slightest affection. It wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t always lead me to where I wanted to end up. I only did it to feel, though often it alienated me further from myself. I could only keep believing so much without seeing, without touching. I kept some parts off-limits. But going anywhere showed me how to be here. Where I can give those parts freely.