I Need You So Much Closer: The Fleeting Nature of Intimacy
About the series: “I Need You So Much Closer”
Intimacy — what does it mean to you? Death Cab for Cutie sings about it as a yearning impossibility in their 2000s classic “Transatlanticism,” some only view it as sex, others have an immense fear of the feeling. It can mean everything and nothing or be achieved with everyone and no one but yourself; it’s a complicated concept that changes with experience, especially in such an odd circumstance as quarantine. At Camp Thirlby, we relish in this vast range and simply view intimacy as an act of closeness — with romantic partners, friends, strangers, even yourself. It can be a simultaneously rewarding and terrifying experience, and self-isolation can amplify those feelings — especially when intimacy feels so unattainable. Our Camp Counselors have decided to reflect on the ways in which they find, or fail to find, this closeness, either inside or outside of the pandemic. Ranging from finding new ways of closeness during a time of crisis or rethinking past notions of intimacy, these odes to needing the affinity of people act as a reminder to its importance in a time when everything feels so distant.
I remember the first time I ever felt intimacy: I was 18, crying over the fact that my first girl crush was leaving for college, nervous that I would never feel those first-time butterflies again and that my soulmate had gotten away. Although she was definitely not the one for me, I had dreamt up a connection between the two of us that would inspire my queer realizations and the several (bad) poems I wrote about her. A connection so deep, at least to me, that it would make me realize I was gay! I found the ability to connect with myself through another person — maybe in quite an odd, unreciprocated way, which I have no desire to recreate now, but still in a way that made sense at the time.
I felt closer to her through writing, through yearning, through all of my self-realizations, and although I never opened up to her, I opened up to myself through her. At the time, intimacy looked like a heartbroken sob sesh with a few sapphic poems written by a girl who was fresh out of high school, about to embark on an entirely new journey filled with so much intimacy to develop.
But right now, when intimacy feels so unattainable, I keep asking myself — how are any of us supposed to know what form of intimacy we yearn for when most types feel as if they are constantly fleeting?
At 18, all I knew was that I wanted to explore it all. I was absolutely enamored by the possibility of being with another human, thinking that my first sexual experience would mean that I finally accomplished a life-long goal, and that my crash course in intimacy would come to a halt soon after. I don’t even think this belief came from the societal consensus that “losing your virginity” ultimately changes your life; I was certain that I wouldn’t start dividing my life into B.S. (before sex) and A.S. (after sex). But it was my desire to get my feet wet, especially once I had come out to myself. Now that I had accepted myself, where oh where was my girlfriend? The two were a package deal — sex and a girlfriend — and I didn’t really think much more on that desire.
But, I soon learned that things are rarely that simple; I had thrown myself into several experiences just for the sake of experiencing new things, yet I still hadn’t figured out why I was yearning for those experiences so badly — especially when they would just fade away.
The beginnings of an intimacy that just began blooming faded for the first time in my university’s dining hall, when the first girl I ever “dated” told me to my face: “I’m just not invested anymore.” I had started to feel this, too, but I was too afraid to let go of something that I thought could be really, really good — because intimacy just takes work, right? So what if I don’t like her that much; I could learn and grow, as it was my first more-than-once fling. I told her I agreed without even thinking about it, said I still wanted to be friends, and quickly walked away (we haven’t spoken since). One brief cry session in my freshman dorm room later, I understood that I wasn’t necessarily sad about her leaving, but sad about the concept of having a person vanish right before my eyes. I didn’t cry about her again.
I haven’t written a poem about a crush since the day before college began, but I miss one thing about the tear stricken drama — the clarity of knowing exactly how I was feeling. Instead of writing about crushes from afar, I was stuck in the mud, lacking the courage to seek out a new person, especially after my first “breakup.” It then turned into wanting that intimacy back, but only appearing in an unclear, foggy version. Part of me misses that newness of not knowing what experiences would bring me, part of me doesn’t.
I longed for those experiences — for intimacy that could last. I yearned for the thrill of being able to kiss someone after a date, of smiling whenever I saw a crush’s name appear on my screen, of being able to say that I just started seeing someone. I wanted to keep feeling these things — that fluttery feeling I got from my first crush, but maybe with the added excitement of reciprocity — but ultimately wasn’t quite sure how to attain them. My desires had no direction; I assumed that experiences of intimacy would fall into my lap. I didn’t feel the urge to take intimacy into my own hands; I was simply waiting for it to happen to me.
“i wish i had kissed you before you left,” I found myself texting the first person I had a genuine connection with six months after she moved across the country, leaving me more heartbroken than ever. She was back in town for a week, and I so desperately wanted to feel those butterflies I felt whenever she tucked my hair behind my ear. Instead, I felt a pit in my stomach that kept on growing. I didn’t know what to feel but loss, like my world was over and I would never feel the things I felt for her for someone else again.
She texted back: “i wish you did too.”
I didn’t see her again until another six months later, catching up at a bar to find out she was dating again. I still wasn’t dating, but I finally felt at ease.
While I mourned my loss of her and what could’ve been the entire year prior, I now mourned my personal loss of 2018, for thinking what we had was so perfect that I refused to attempt intimacy with another person. This isn’t to say that I didn’t attempt some semblance of it — because I definitely did — but it lacked purpose, it lacked connection.
I still didn’t know what intimacy meant to me, what it could mean. I was absolutely lost.
I still feel absolutely lost.
(Some days.)
My longing for intimate validation kept growing each day — I yearned for security and comfort wrapped in a box of excitement. I wanted to get really close to someone, but keep finding each day that there’s more to unravel, that security and impulse could be one in the same. Was this the intimacy I truly wanted — a closeness that keeps going, with no end in sight?
I realized I wanted this too much, too much to the point that I wouldn’t even notice if my partner wasn’t returning that closeness to the extent I deserved. One moment of intimacy a month felt like enough for me; I would always carry the challenge of unraveling her.
I felt my walls go back up, immediately, after four months of trying to crack a person who would only open up to me sometimes, who would only share that intimacy I so desperately craved once in a blue moon. We didn’t even kiss goodbye — it was an awkward hug that left me longing for something we never had. I plugged in my earphones and cried while walking home — my mind still replays it as a montage of strangers staring at a sad girl who was trying to get back home but was too busy spiraling and listening to Adult Mom sing “Sorry for writing all those love songs for you, is that suffocating to you too?”
I called my best friend to spill the news as I sat on my couch, clutching raw cookie dough, wondering why I would ever want something that could hurt this badly — if I never even had it to begin with.
I vaguely remember a message I received only five days later — something along the lines of “you’re hot” and “i also love boygenius”— although I think there was more; I probably blacked out the rest of it. These words represent my first message on Tinder since I redownloaded it, my first look into what my life could be after that last loss of intimacy. For the first time, I didn’t want the connection I’d been longing for since I was 18, I only wanted some semblance of validation. Was that intimacy? Can endless swiping ever be intimacy? I’m still not sure, but at the time, I thought it was nothing. I quickly replied, we messaged all night, I got her number the next day, she asked me out for drinks the day after, to which I responded “i just got out of a weird relationship, maybe in a few weeks?”
I was genuinely afraid of getting hurt again, of wasting more time looking for intimacy that simply didn’t exist, but I viewed my “yes, but later” response not as a delay in finding intimacy but as an alternate path.
I dove in, somehow finding a type of affection I didn’t know possible. Although most of the time, when I try to remember what we created, I can only remember her text that said “this moved too fast” two months into whatever it was we were in. But I can also remember my decision to forgive her a month after simply because I asked for that strange form of intimacy we had found together — texting until 2 a.m., losing ourselves in the excitement of seeing each other once a week, getting validation from trading compliments, doing an awful job at keeping it “casual.” It’s not a form of intimacy I necessarily want back, but I strangely long for it every few weeks.
I immediately get furious at myself for wanting that.
I remember crying in a taxi at 5 a.m. in Prague, about to embark on a 15+ hour day of travel. Minutes before, I was kissing goodbye to my short-term fling, who will forever be distilled as a dreamy European romance — her last words to me were “Even though this won’t last, I’m really happy to have met you.” I knew I would hold our shared intimacy close to my heart when, a few days earlier at a queer film festival party, the words “I’ve never felt so validated kissing a girl in public. Thank you for showing me that possibility,” left her mouth in between songs.
It was ten days that I spent submerged in intimacy, the kind that I wanted to trap inside amber and store in a special place in my heart. Opening up, even if for a small amount of time, felt far more liberating than being used or even being in a serious relationship. Intimacy finally had more than one meaning to me; it had infinite possibilities. It was so breathtaking because we knew it would end, but did all types of this thrilling form have to come to an abrupt close? Did distance have to end things before they inevitably got bad — just as they did in my past experiences?
I often get sad about the fact that I can’t vividly remember every second of our romance; maybe it was meant to only exist in that long week of November.
I get furious at myself, for the millionth time, for letting her back in. The “this moved too fast” from one month ago — that same “casual” Tinder fling — suddenly became an “i can’t stop thinking about you.” I went down that path again just to catch a glimpse of that ephemeral closeness that would inevitably fade, and part of me knew it wouldn’t last — she decided that ending things through a paragraph-long text for the second time felt reasonable. Two months later: “I’m seeing someone else, monogamously.” With our second trial, I felt agency over finally knowing what intimacy felt right for me — and it suddenly cracked; I was lost. I hated myself for thinking it could work this time around. There were too many meanings to intimacy, too many possibilities. Too many connections to be made and types of connections; this vast range that once excited me now overwhelmed me.
I still didn’t write poems, this time about loss rather than lust. I didn’t know how to put a loss of intimacy — a feeling I know all too well — into coherent thoughts. I didn’t know myself.
I find myself tearing up from a letter I just got in the mail; it’s week eight (maybe less, maybe more) of quarantine, and I’m reading the words of a girl I’ve never met in the flesh. “I hold the people I love and care for to really high standards and that has left me feeling really disappointed/unsatisfied in a lot of my relationships — but with you that does not feel like the case at all — and I feel like that means a lot to me.” I read it over and over again, rolling it around in my head, saying it out loud, feeling the words gain meaning as I watch them resonate throughout my history.
I feel the exact same way about her, I feel a form of intimacy that I didn’t know existed — maybe an intimacy I was searching for my entire life. And it wasn’t a soon-to-expire one; rather, one that swells more and more each day.
I write back to her: “I thought I simply didn’t deserve this level of intimacy and compassion, or that a single person could even give that to me. Because of this, you mean so much to me — just as I wasn’t looking for anything, you kind of effortlessly fell into my lap.”
I’m finally writing again. It may not be a love poem, but it’s a love letter, and this time, she’ll see it.
It’s an intimacy that feels both shared and infinite — something that I feel like I’ve been yearning for for so long. Yet, it’s not everything I have ever dreamed of; I can’t touch her, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to.
It feels impossible in quarantine to even consider such a thing as intimacy; how can I feel close to someone without the luxury of holding her hand, of having sex, of getting to intimately know what she smells like? But I remember that I always get triggered from smelling the perfume of an ex weeks, even months, after a breakup, reminding me of how quickly an intimacy can be lost — just as fast as it was formed.
Everything used to feel like it was fleeting, like my bouts of intimacy would ultimately come to an end — maybe because I stopped wanting to dig deeper into a person’s soul, or maybe because they stopped. I never even had the chance to grasp onto what I truly wanted out of intimacy until it was inevitably gone.
It came in several feelings — some mostly about sex, some mostly about defining the relationship (an experience I don’t know all too well). Some thrived off of a lack of labels; the freedom of being in the present made intimacy bloom into a powerful entity that felt right at the time. But most were short-lived — the ten days of really getting to connect to a human just to say goodbye, my heart racing whenever I saw her face just to be triggered by it months later, the rare moments of touch from a partner that would disappear for weeks at a time.
But I now cherish those moments that don’t feel as transient — “Not everything is fleeting. Some feelings are deep,” Heloise says during one of my favorite scenes of A Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I am finally understanding that line now, as I currently feel a depth of intimacy that keeps digging deeper, every day, and proves to me that intimacy doesn’t have to be a flash in time. It can be real, it can be worthwhile, it can be meaningful for years to come.
I want to keep writing about these intimacies — to capture them onto paper, to make them permanent, even if they end up vanishing. At least I’ll know they meant something at that time.
About the Author
Natalie Geisel (she/her) is a senior at The George Washington University studying women’s, gender, and sexuality studies with minors in English and communication. Her love of writing sprouted from starting her fashion blog in high school, and her current written work focuses on topics of LGBTQ+ content, culture, and identity. Launching and managing Camp Thirlby was out of interest in intersecting gender and sexuality into the world of youth and wellness, hoping to add marginalized voices, like her own queer one, to an underrepresented community. When she’s not writing, she spends her spare time at dance rehearsal, attending local indie shows in the DC area, or finding the best cafes that serve oat milk. She’s passionate about inclusive sex education and sustainable fashion and thinks everyone should be, too. You can view all of her written work on her website.
