While I am lying in my bed and you are lying in your bed there is an entire world between us. And in the span of a single conversation people die and cosmos shift and my roommates come home and I paint my nails and I imagine what it might be like to take my clothes off for you. What I am interested in are the parts I do not, and cannot, possibly know or understand from this incredible distance. Those are the pieces I am seeking.
I am interested in the way that our space defines us, how my attic is not your attic and the floors we stand on have more to say about who we are than we do. We identify ourselves through things we can point at. But what is like to be breathe near each other?
Harvard created a study, 36 questions to be exact, that are supposed to make two people fall in love. And what the study really shows is that the questions will make you know someone in a way you couldn’t possibly without asking them. Even if you are to ask these questions to someone you have been with for a long time. The idea is that we stop learning at some point. The questions create or recreate a level of intimacy achieved in the state we find ourselves in now, 645 miles apart.
What I am also interested in is how people get pulled into orbit with one another; how we happen along each other on the street or elsewhere. And why we are set in a direction, or our minds pulled into a loop. Why we are suddenly so aware of each others existence in this world that it seems impossible it used to be otherwise? And just the idea of this and mostly the not knowing vibrates so close to the surface I can feel it on my skin. On skin you haven’t even touched yet.
And while we are lying in bed, these are the 36 questions we ask.
THE LITTLE BLACQUE BLOG 