The government has determined ‘intimate partners’ are immune to that virus. Not explicitly, obviously, but should you have an intimate partner, you are exempt from the 5km bubble we are isolated to. After dark, when the curfew kicks in, and the streets fall empty, should you desire their company you are free to travel to their open arms, from wherever it is that you call work.
This begins to beg the question, what is intimacy, and why must it be confined to sex? In this ever progressive city, such a law could see one person travelling between several houses under the guise of intimacy. Yet, all the while, our contently single and solo living friends are deprived of the necessary human contact we all require, and deserve, in order to thrive.
As someone who is laden with an affinity for nostalgia, I find intimacy in almost everything. It manifests itself in a physical response that continues to floor me. This hypersensitivity has, at times, left me unconscious on a train platform, in the foyer of a cinema, splayed on the front lawn of a stranger’s house. As a child, the doctor diagnosed me with a Hyperactive Vagus Nerve, resulting in syncope – or fainting – and said I’d be sure to grow out of it. At twenty seven years old, my knees still buckle when intimacy becomes too much. See, for me, it is not always romantic. The tenderness of humans at times overwhelms. But mostly, it does impel me to swoon. These intimate moments, how they steal my thoughts.
The afternoon slash of sun across my bed. How it crawls.
‘A breath of idolatry kissed and breathed across the room’.
The slow meditation of eating fresh fish. Rare as it is.
How, just the other night, the man I am dating stood at the end of my bed and shook my doona in the air. How it made me feel like a child. When my father would throw it high, one, two, three times. How I’d giggle into a ball in order to disappear beneath the linen.
Every time I see Ilana Glazer flaunt her underarm hair for the world to see.
Baking bread and picking wattle and writing love letters for my friend, who on a Saturday, was really going through it. Leaving the gifts at her door. Anticipating how it might soothe the tensing muscles in her neck. Durga Chew-Bose calls this the privacy of kindness. The intimacy of it not yet being felt, and its necessary duality to flourish.
Dusk, when the neighbour’s amber kitchen light turns on and the street is blue and the contrast between the natural and artificial glow warms my bones.
The inside of a forearm. Fresh out of winter, veins iridescent, pining for the hum of a rarely felt sun.
When Adrienne Lanker sings Mama got drunk and Daddy went crazy
or
in the final track of Depression Cherry, when the music swells as Victoria Legrand echoes
I know it comes too soon, and then, the universe is riding off with you
or
at the moment Grace Cummings drawls just because you need it, doesn’t mean it’s missing
and
whenever Aldous Harding opens her mouth, but mostly when she says If a big cold bird tried to bring me a baby / I feel I would, get on his back, kissing his neck / Breathe in and out, kissing the doubt / And whisper softly, I don't want entry / That place is empty.
When my mother first FaceTimed me, having never known what the little video icon was.
My neighbour’s eyes, how they strike.
Going to the movies on one of those summer days, where Melbourne is an oven and we’re all breathing through our mouths. Waiting for the cool change.
Speaking of cinema - the final scene of The Revenant, when Leonardo’s wife walks away in the snow. The expression on her face, how it soothes.
The opening chapter of Flames, by Robbie Arnott.
Whenever I’m alone in the middle of the bush, listening to the birds, the trees.
First light on mountaintops.
Short-shorts on long legs.
Stretching out as the lactic acid dissipates in my limbs.
Being serenaded by Neil Finn in the Supernatural Amphitheatre. How we all sung along, together.
My niece, unable to pronounce my name, screaming joyfully when I visit, Aunty Fweedie! How my sister, her mother, still sometimes calls me Freedie, a nickname adopted when I was as small as my niece is now.
Laughing until I hurt, on the first of January, with a friend I had not seen in years.
That moment when someone I love, begins to quake. The look in their eyes before they fill with tears. That is intimacy.
When Arundhati Roy talks about the Love Laws, she says they ‘lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much’. She was talking about the segregation of class in India. But somehow, Roy speaks to the schism in our city, when legally I am not able to hand those gifts to my friend when she’s really going through it, but I am allowed to sleep at my partner’s house. The house he shares with three other people, who also sleep at someone else’s house. And sure, we wear masks in public and our hands are cracking under the weight of the sanitiser, but it doesn’t exempt our lungs from filling with fluid. It does not protect us when an airborne virus hovers in the fresh produce aisle. Lingering, just out of sight.
Intimate adjective 1. associated in close personal relations: an intimate friend.
Partner noun 1. a sharer or partaker; an associate.
These linguistic definitions come from Macquarie Dictionary’s dot com site. While there are many interpretations of the words, the first and foremost are ones I imagine our State Government haven’t wanted to consider.
I do believe our bunkering down is for the best. The curfew is necessary and the masks are a given. The numbers prove we’re doing the right thing. But that does not stop me from visiting my friend on her thirtieth birthday, knowing that we both live alone. Or from delighting in the warm hum in my chest, when I stand across from her, and a storm is wailing, and she is smiling as she tells me how it feels, to have me there, by her side.
Freia Lily is a Melbourne based journalist and photographer. She has a keen infatuation with the natural world, and how it affects the human experience of trauma.