Intimacy is the Thing
You can fuck someone ten times a week and never touch the thing that aches behind their eyes,
The part they flinch from when brushing their own teeth in the mirror before work,
The word they cannot say but hear in their dreams, the silence they practice so well,
And none of it makes your hand on their thigh mean more than an echo in a hallway.
Intimacy is the thing that happens when no one is pretending to be better than broken,
When someone sees the bruise you hide from yourself and says nothing, just stays,
It is not counted in climaxes or measured in hours, but in the breath you hold
When you almost say the thing you fear will empty the room, and they do not leave.
You can know the slope of someone’s shoulder like your own heartbeat in the middle of the night,
Trace it in the dark with your tongue and still be a stranger to their oldest truths,
Because fucking is easy when your mouth is full but your soul stays behind the curtain,
And much harder when someone holds your guilt without flinching or turning away.
There is something more sacred than sex and it lives in the awkward pauses that stay heavy,
In the mess of telling someone what your father never said, what your mother never asked,
In the way you admit that sometimes you lie just to feel like no one can reach you,
And in the moment your breath stumbles but you do not stop speaking anyway.
I have seen more closeness in two people passing a bottle in silence and not looking away,
Than in rooms full of sweat and bravado, all moans with no meaning behind the breath,
Because there are things you cannot share unless your gut is bleeding and torn,
And only then does the body become more than a thing used to forget yourself.
So do not sell me the myth of chemistry without confession, that slickness equals truth,
Do not call it closeness if you never once spoke the thing that haunts you at 3 a.m.,
Because I want the kind of naked that leaves your ego shaking in the corner,
The kind where even the hardest parts of you finally get named and do not scare anyone away.