Intimacy

It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, and end. It’s not a throughline to a destination. It is, instead, a series of tangents, explorations, questions, mistakes, overlaps — and moments of sudden and glimmering insight.

pleasure is : the communication between your body and the world.

romance and sex are really just two people trying to understand and enter each other’s realities

Real sex is not a story; it is something which exists within itself, folding and unfolding around itself. It is less a structure, more a melting.

A fake orgasm happens because it needs to happen, because we don’t know what to say, because we don’t know how to get across what we want.

Sensuality, Baldwin wrote, requires presence. When you distrust your own desires, when your body is unfamiliar to you, how can you ever hope to be present with, to connect with someone else?

The longer you spend in false pleasure, the more it feels like the real thing.

Knowing I’ll never fully know anyone is what makes it feel like such a gift when someone lets me in, even a little. When they tell me the thing they didn’t post about. When they trust me with the part that doesn’t make a good story. When they let me see the mess behind the metaphor.

It was like someone handed me a flashlight and aimed it toward the edges of my vision, illuminating a world I’d always suspected was there. Suddenly, the woman walking briskly through the parking garage wasn’t just late, she was carrying something. The barista handing over my coffee wasn’t just tired, he was in the middle of something big, or hard,... See more