This Is Us
Reclaiming Friendship in the Age of Isolation
Quarantine has me longing for an intimacy I didn’t know I missed
Deep into state-mandated quarantine, two of my dearest friends come to my house to drink wine and eat take-out on my roof. Maybe it’s the shared experience of pent-up-ness, six months into being told friends are off limits; maybe it’s cosmic alignment. But we’re having similar existential crises around our bisexual identities, and community care feels like — well — communing.
Late into the night, we get to know each other deeply — our histories, our fears, our dreamscapes, where they overlap and intertwine, where they fork only to come back together — while decontextualized fireworks pop overhead. We connect not in the slow, meandering way that adults tend to form bonds over time, but rapid-fire. We deep dive into intimacy like the only way out of our feeling alone is through a togetherness forged by vulnerability.
There’s a neediness hanging in the air — for being seen, for laughing too loudly. And because we’re women — and more specifically, queer femmes — who used to be girls, we have a collective memory of caretaking in this way.
It feels, at least in the moment, like one of the most powerful experiences of my life. Later, the only way I…
