An Intimate Distance.

As I look up, I notice there are tears rolling down her cheeks, but I wouldn’t say that she is crying. There is nothing active about it. Despite the apparent displeasure of this state of being, it seems like she is comfortable in it, like it required no catalyst to cause this reaction, nor would there be any fanfare to putting out the subsequent fire. The structure will either burn down or survive, it seems okay with either outcome. Still, being bound by a declining morsel of propriety, I decide I should acknowledge the tears.

“Do you want me to comfort you?” I ask her, barely looking up from the keyboard.

She shakes her head. I believe her, because that is the nature of our engagement. We talked about the possibility that she would have an emotional response to this process, she let me know all the possibilities of what she may experience, I asked whether it was okay to drive her to these places, and to unrelentingly dig within them. We made informed decisions about what we are doing and that makes me feel like less of a monster for not being able to summon any empathy for her.

“Can I keep going then?” I ask her.

She nods her head and I immediately dig at the heart of the pain, I question it and insert myself inside it, like the ghost of a lurker haunting your home because it was built upon the curb where they once loitered. She keeps answering me as I continue to interrogate, I stop her and make her explain her words, I direct her to compare them with a different part of her life and she just does it. I feel at peace in this space. I’m not trying to hurt her, nor would I be able to enjoy her pain if I were truly causing any, I’m not even trying to enjoy any power that the ability to question may be extending to me, that’s not what is working for me about this. I don’t care about any emotion I may or may not cause, I only care that she keeps answering my questions, no matter what it is that I ask, and she does. I want her brain to feel as unresistant to inquiry and exploration as mine does when I am doing this to myself, I want the ability to think as her. It’s vital to the process of writing a book about her, and not only about her, as her. In order to do that, even as a somewhat fictionalised and slightly whimsical version as the truth, I need access to her in ways that seem inappropriate when I meet people in other settings. Every single question I do not ask people because it would be improper to pry into their personal emotional space, I ask her because I can. This is the most comfortable I have been in a non-sexual and non-romantic social space.

There is an intimate distance between us.

That is something I often say about my spouse, but in his case, it is achieved a different way. He does so many things to me that only make sense from afar, up close it is chaos, when I try to step closer and understand him, I have absolutely no ability to glean from where these motivations arise. I have no idea why he wants to hurt me, to break me into pieces, to make me behave in ways that make no human sense, but when he does it, the world makes sense. When he stands just far enough and pulls the strings, I don’t just know how the marionette must dance, I know why. I could reach out to him and claw my fist through his chest and I still wouldn’t be able to touch the part of his soul that steps on my face like I am dirt, it is so alien, I don’t even know where he keeps it when he just exists around me and in the world. I know the exact temperature of his breath in my face, but he feels cold as ice when he is actually there. My back has a permanent indentation from where his thumb bores into me when he fucks me, but I’ve never known what it feels like to touch him when he is doing it. There are layers and layers of ritual and madness between him and I. Even when he is inside me, I cannot relate to his pleasure at all, but this distance, both of motivation and protocol, feels like gazing upon a lover from a balcony. Every inch between us, is doused in history, longing and want; every step is a revelation left strewn across the ground for strangers to trample and for us to feel.

That’s not how it is achieved with her.

She makes a lot of sense to me. Too much, even. It’s not because of the incidental similarities in our lives, it’s because of what we do with them. It’s not because of our habits, it’s because of why we developed those habits. I understand her, the language she speaks, though different than mine is built with the same syntactic convention as mine. I should probably feel close to her, but I’m allowed not to have to. Not even to think about it. The goal of our interaction is very clearly defined, the terms of engagement are specific and agreed-upon and as a result I am allowed not to have to monitor this 25-hour conversation for emotional cues on how I should respond. I am allowed to just pursue the story. I’m allowed to run rampant and wild through her life but I don’t even have to see her as a person as she exists right in front of me, even when I know exactly how feeling unseen could cause her to feel. The words I transmit onto the screen are allowed to matter more than everyone in the room, her and I, are just media. All of my feelings are directed at the character, even as the person inside it, sits right in front of me stroking a white cat who has a penchant for lemongrass. There is so much distance here. The distance is filled with weight, though. It’s filled with the reality of her, and of me; of all her secrets and all of my unbridled sentimentality towards the process of writing, it feels the realm between us.

Later, I would like to address it with her. I would like to talk about it. I would like to feel seen in it and open my eyes to her humanity as well.

Right now, this intimate distance makes me feel like the world makes sense. Like my greed for the stories and pain of other people isn’t a strange and unusual thing that I have to keep explaining. Like I don’t have to explain that I am not a cold and unemotional person, I just enjoy a space where I can be so little of a person, that you come to expect as little of me as would an object that digs through your life and puts it into words. Thinking of me as a person while I do this would be like thinking of a vibrator like a person while it makes you come, you could do it, but it’s not going to talk back. I just need some time with the people of the world when I don’t have to think about identifying their feelings and responding appropriately, I can just encroach upon them instead. It almost feels like a violation, like it shouldn’t be allowed. I could reach into her life and ask to look at anything. Like she is a jewellery display case.

But I am not buying her.

At best I am a surveyor. At worst a sad little voyeur. I couldn’t buy her if I tried. That’s the thing with living life one intimate distance at a time, you can never afford to buy, and if you did, if you truly owned something, you’d know everything about it already and have no remaining interest in it at all. I don’t buy, I don’t gather. I lurk in the background of intimacy, like an errant child at a keyhole, and a spy at their desk. My shadow lurks in the lives of people, always chronicling, committing to memory that which someday we will all forget. I wander in people’s lives.

Sometimes I haunt.

That’s your choice, really.

The ghost of me isn’t really me at all.