Covid Intimacies

The passing days and weeks have been punctuated by mourning. It’s true: the grieving of mundane life, sociability, employment, freedom, of feelings of certainty and trust in the future. And, for some, including myself, the mourning of a certain form of sexuality.

Living with two roommates (who are always on the go) and without my sweetheart (hypochondriac), I have found myself deprived of intimacy. I don’t know for how much longer this abstinence will be imposed on me, and this uncertainty is often dizzying, agonizing.

That said, the current times are also peppered with fragments of resistance and survival.

Small bursts of light and humanity that pierce the darkness despite everything, underlining our deeply resilient, stubborn, human character. Sexuality is no exception.

Over the past few weeks, I have been surprised by mine and my partner’s ingenuity and creativity in maintaining our sex lives. Pornography has gradually lost much of its appeal, becoming an object that is too easily accessible, too spectacular, while concrete, physical sexual encounters have acquired an added value through their newfound rarity.

I found myself simply stroking my genitals, with my eyes closed, trying to remember the texture of my boyfriend’s skin, the lovely hairs that adorn his firm chest, the shape of his pink lips, the taut skin of his erect penis, the features of his face when he ejaculates inside me…

For the first time in a long time, I have embellished my erotic experience with my own imagination. While orgasm was harder to achieve, the peak of pleasure was even more intense, the awareness of taking some time for myself even more tangible.

Deprived of the object of my desire, I was forced to reinvent it, slowly but surely.

As lockdown days go by, the more our erotic texts became frequent and intense. We take the time to write out our desires in the form of elaborate scenarios, grammatical gymnastics and entanglements of verbs and adjectives, each hotter than the next. We want to touch and caress each other with words, a rich commodity the pandemic has not brutally snatched away from us.

Then came the images and videos. Through the insidious and intrusive cameras that are ingrained in our daily lives, we have managed to playfully stage performances and nourish our relationship. We continued to grow, to desire, to come. Our erotic history continues to be written.

I am lucky to have saved some of our homemade videos on my iPhone (sorry, mom!). I pull them up on my phone, like a soldier unwraps a loaf of bread and butter in wartime. Scarcity begets gratitude. I savor every second, every pixel.

Exchanges are often written in the conditional tense. If I could. If you were. I would take you. I would lick you. You would eat. All of this makes me realize that freedom, as we know it, is absolutely conditional. Conditional to a safe environment, a healthy planet, accountable and transparent governments.

But somewhere in the prison that has become my bright, 3-bedroom apartment on the Plateau (talk about the gentrification of lockdown!), I also realized that sexuality could happen despite it all, via language and staging. A moving image, a frozen image, a memory, the fragment of a torso, a word, and voilà, sexuality germinates, takes root, keeps going.

Somewhere in absence, I have found presence.