Intellectual Intimacy
Thinking in Someone Else's Direction
For those who believe emotional proximity is the first meaningful occurrence.
French Connections was made to be read like a letter—slowly, personally, and with someone in mind. The stories stay close, even after the last line.
Crafted for Blushers (Founding Members), as part of the Love Lexis Series.
Oh, there you are. Reading this, stepping inside my mind. Or perhaps I’ve stepped into yours first. That’s the quiet thing about intellectual intimacy: you rarely know who crossed the threshold first. Only that, at some point, a thought passed between us, and stayed.
If Fancy Me a Flirty Fencing teased with playful likeness through first-base exchange, and Speak()Easy to Me attuned itself to language as shared terrain, then this piece is something like third base, for minds. The moment when you can almost feel where their thoughts begin to press against yours, being touched by the right words.
When a Mind Takes Up Residence in Your Own
Virginia Woolf once wrote that a woman needs a room of her own. A space untouched by intrusion, where thought might stretch without apology. I built mine out of thought. Slowly. Subtly. Over time, I placed certain ideas in reach, left others deliberately in shadow. It was a mental architecture. Lived-in, lightly defended.
Some rooms you keep for yourself, for preservation rather than out of secrecy. You let the light in, still keep the threshold clear. And then, without quite realizing it, someone steps in.
It was late. One of those in-between hours, when the restaurant hadn’t yet turned into a dance floor, but had stopped pretending to be anything else. We were a group in pause. Conversations looping, idling. A few stood to get drinks.
That’s when O. turned toward me.
