In this mad world of spectacle and speed, intimacy is the rarest revolt. And the most vital. Not an accessory to life, but its essence.

Ultimately, the most challenging intimacy is the one we cultivate with ourselves . To sit alone and meet our own eyes without flinching. To know our hunger, our contradictions, our unbearable tenderness, and respond with compassion rather than contempt.

Children come into the world fluent in intimacy. They lean into their parents’ bodies, whisper to animals, reach for strangers with unfiltered longing. They are poets of presence, unburdened by irony. But we train them out of it. We tell them not to stare, not to cry, not to touch

grief is not a sign of failure. It’s proof that intimacy occurred. That something real, unreplicable, was created between two beings. That for a time, we stood outside the machinery of indifference and chose to matter to one another

Grief, too, is the shadow side of intimacy, the proof of how deeply we have been known and how difficult it is to be un-known

Intimacy is not a series of dramatic declarations, but the accumulation of undramatic devotion