Prompt: Intimacy
My First Encounter with True Intimacy
And it wasn’t sexual at all
I called him my guru — although he certainly didn’t consider himself one. It was 1999, I had lumps growing in my breasts, and he was who the Universe had sent me to unravel the lineage of breast cancer that had taken almost every woman in my family. He was my first real teacher and ironically the first person I experienced real intimacy with.
I remember him looking into my eyes as we spoke. It was like he wasn’t there and fully there all at the same time. He was just listening. There was no judgment. There were no filters. He was just completely present… and he could see right into my soul.
As the weeks went on, he felt like the first person who had ever seen me for who I truly was. I had lots of people in my life who loved me including my parents, my husband, and friends. But it was as if they had some kind of filter up — that maybe they saw who they were capable of seeing — a limited version of me based on wherever their psyche was at the time.
But he just saw me — and he smiled a lot at what he saw.
One thing I learned from him was a total lack of judgment. I could have told him that I was an ax-murderer and he would have just continued smiling and kept chatting. He had…
