Nearness and Things of That Sort

I went to my friend Luke’s house this afternoon to go sledding. 

I rap on the door and wait for what feels like a minute. It was forty four seconds (I counted), then I opened the door anyways, despite not being attended to. 

“Let's be childlike!!!”, I pleaded to the guys. A group of them were strewn out among the couches as the hockey game on the TV blared and filled the room. I didn't recognize two of the five piled in the living room. They were quiet. After some time, everyone obliged to my pleas. So we went sledding and everyone giggled, even that quiet two out of five. I skidded my butt onto the cement and it hurt like hell. It reminded me of skidding my knee running down my steep ass driveway as a kid - where I used to hang out with my former neighbor Olivia and we would make dumb music videos. But I won’t romanticize this part of the story too much because like I said, 

It hurt like hell.

Afterwards we sat inside warming up from the snow and listened to jazz, queued up by the most reliable of mood setting DJs, Luke Bentlage himself. He explained the rules of poker to me as I sat alongside peering at his cards and trying to follow along with all the commotion and succinct finger taps on the wooden coffee table. I don’t like to gamble, really.

But what I do like is that poker urges eye contact. The bluffing, the reading of expressions and staring at one another in the face. 

Hey, that’s real intimacy. 

I don’t speak about intimacy in the sexy-like bed full of roses and shared bubble bath kind of way. I mean the kind of intimacy that just draws someone “near”.Closeness. Familiarity. The nearness that children have when sharing toys or sitting by one another at snacktime. The leaning in to tell a secret in a crowded room. The strategic facial expressions shared while playing a game of poker.

It is intimate to stare at someone’s face and try to read if they are fibbing about their good cards or not. It’s intimate to study their jaw muscles and if they squint their eyes or not, or if they are holding back a cheeky smile. I was so giddy just thinking about how everyone is just swapping expressions, facial cues, glares and glances, that I was hardly focused on learning the rules. How RIVETING to look at one another in the face. 

It seems so radical to be intimate these days.

You know that monkey experiment that we all learned about in high school? Whether it was a psychology or science class, you probably learned about the scientist Henry Harlow that ran an experiment on rhesus monkeys in the 50s.

It demonstrated that attachment is primarily driven by contact comfort rather than nourishment. Baby monkeys, when given a choice between a soft, cloth-covered surrogate “mother” and a wire “mother” equipped with a feeding bottle, spent an overwhelming 18 hours a day clinging to the soft mother.

THE BABY MONKEY LITERALLY CHOSE THE WARMTH OF A HUG OVER SATISFYING ITS BIOLOGICAL HUNGER.

Which just goes to show, intimate connection is really not optional.

The other day I made a comment to a guy in the grains aisle of the grocery store about how much I loved a particular brand of noodles. He, honest to God, looked at me like an absolute martian.

"Why the hell is this girl talking to me?”, he likely thought.

"Why is this man so alarmed by a casual conversation?", I certainly thought.

This is one instance of many times I have found myself with someone that found this casual engagement to be perplexing.

We are desperately living in the wake of an intimacy drought. When did that happen? When did our neighbors become foreigners? What is the point of neighborhoods if not to have a barbecue with Big Joe down the block and lend Mrs. Cindy some sugar before she has to ask. Are we really, truly just lumped together, close in proximity because that's the efficient way to live life? To maximize space? 

I really don’t think so.

I beg of you to bring the word intimacy out of its steamy bedroom light.