this is basically a piece about intimacy, but also about how it feels when you work as an advocate for survivors of intimate partner violence and your partner is gaslighting you

He tells me he is scared of intimacy

and does not know how to let down his walls.

He says he is afraid of loving me,

scared of losing me or himself or something else that he can't name.

I am sitting in his bed and wondering how 

I'm gonna feed myself if I keep filling up my hands 

with how much I've been willing to give away.

We're talking about intimacy like the closest thing you can be to someone is their lover.

Like I'm not walking daily into rooms with strangers who pour stories from themselves

into me, into the air of the room around us. 

The way I used to become covered in the fluids from people's bodies,

their blood and amniotic fluid, shit and urine.

Like the memory of taking a warm, wet washcloth 

and slowly washing dried blood from someone's thighs doesn't still guide my hand now.

And I'm thinking of my clients whose choices might be life or death when it comes to relying on this room of strangers. How there are events so intimately painful that to carry them alone is to swallow poison. How opening becomes an act of survival, how if your choices are between life and death then is that can we call it choosing? But survival is resistance: reliant, sometimes, on the act of opening. Some of us are given no freedom from intimacy or any pretense at privacy when we wear what has happened to us on our bodies or what has happened to us is because of our bodies or why are our bodies still so vulnerable in this world and how can they be so soft and remember so well?

I'm thinking about how sometimes his hands on my body make me disappear and how he says he just wants to connect but he's so scared of being vulnerable and if only I were just softer or less scary,
somehow.

He says the way I set my boundaries makes it hard for him to set his.

He wants me quiet. I can hear it in his words, how his desire for my silence echoes in each syllable. 

This is a difference between us, our understanding of silence. I have spent much of my life in quiet rooms, rooms filled with the heavy air that foretells change. I have felt silence like a palpable force.

He thinks silence is simply a way to make himself feel more comfortable. He believes in his right to feel safe and comfortable. He thinks it is okay to take the words from his lovers' mouths, to bend them until they are a shape he feels more comfortable with. He is so afraid of intimacy, he wants to talk about what I've done for hours. He uses the language, my language, the language I work with. It feels like pieces of me are being pulled away from my body.

I go to work, wrung out like a wash rag. I listen. I come home. I seem to spend a lot of time in the company of tears. I hear myself apologizing, to him, to my friends and family for still being with him. A client tells me it felt like her heart and her head were going into two different directions and she had to wait for them to come back together. How do you measure the intimacy of hearing yourself in someone else's story? I wait for my heart and my head to come back together. 

He says he is scared of intimacy and I find that I have no choice in avoiding it. 

I call my mother at 6 in the morning.