In this poetry manuscript, I posit a few questions that reverberate throughout the poems: How have I formed intimacies and what are those variations? How have I come to recognize connection across persons, places, moments, and things – where does the distance grow, where does it subside? These questions are particularly important because we are still negotiating and defining topics of intimacy and distance. The variations of intimacy, the ways we come to believe we belong or connect are concepts that still falter through us, we are compiling language for these moments, reinventing the relational – how we might be with one another. This redefining is compounded when we think of how a global pandemic shattered and changed our notions of connection and intimacy. A pandemic that created circumstances for distance to prosper within us, for us to learn what technology might provide us and to in turn yearn for forms of connection we didn’t think we needed as much as we know we do now. Further, this poetry manuscript borrows methodologically from poetic inquiry (Galvin & Prendergast, (2016) and arts-based research methodologies (Leavy, 2015). Particularly, it engages with vox identitatis, or the creation of poems exploring self and identity (Galvin & Prendergast, 2016).
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