It is 8 p.m. and I return home after a long day of work. The door clicks shut, locking out the noise of a city that still feels foreign to me after two years. My bag lands on the floor and my keys on my desk. There is a familiar choreography to what comes next: the hum of the laptop fan, the weight of the foam earcups pressing against my ears, and the soft ‘bloop’ of Discord coming to life. “What scene today?” I type into a group chat that I share with friends. While I wait, I launch a game on Steam anyway – a single-player game that I’m currently exploring. When the green or yellow circles light up around my friends’ icons, the loneliness finally stops weighing so heavily on my chest.

I discovered the joy of gaming during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that I used to dabble in the ‘classics’ like Road Rash or Prince of Persia, but I was never an avid gamer. It was not until I started sharing digital landscapes with close friends that I understood the depth of connection they offered. Be it solving puzzles in the Portal series, killing and looting our way through Diablo III, screaming through Phasmophobia, or surviving Lethal Company runs to fulfil quotas, I realised that that these games were not simply about play. They were about being together across distance and time zones, often without the pressure of articulation. Care and intimacy emerged almost sideways, embedded in shared labour rather than in confession.

I moved countries not long before the pandemic, and then again after. Each move fractured my social world, turning friendships into ‘maintenance chores’. In these new cities, I found myself becoming increasingly unanchored. My mental health felt like a frayed rope. I was often dissociated and moved through my physical space like a ghost. Connections felt slow and awkward; intimacy demanded a fluency that I felt like I had lost somewhere amidst all the moving. I was too exhausted to put in the effort to build up social worlds from scratch every time I would move.

Loneliness, I have learned, is not always managed by deep conversations or physical proximity. I often crash after socialising with people. Moreover, I do not always have the energy to ‘process’ my emotional wellbeing; that requires energy I simply lack when I am burnt out and struggling to perform everyday functions. Sometimes, the easiest form of connection is ‘parallel play’. In disability and neurodiverse communities, this is understood as a profound form of ‘Access Intimacy’. It is the quiet comfort of being in the same space as someone else, doing separate but adjacent things, where intimacy is low-demand and easily accessible. In co-operative gaming, this becomes a form of care. Someone waits for you before progressing; someone drops resources they don’t need but you do; someone adjusts the difficulty level because you have had an exhausting day. These gestures are unremarkable, which is precisely what makes them sustainable. We are ostensibly just discussing how to reach a shared objective in a virtual world. But in the background, the affective textures of our lives slip in.

For the longest time, I believed that romantic relationships were the only legitimate way to access intimacy. I learned to understand intimacy as something that had to be negotiated and performed according to heteronormative scripts, measuring its presence by whether I had a partner to direct it toward. I experienced singlehood as a kind of a waiting room, where intimacy was always deferred to a future romantic relationship that had yet to arrive or may never arrive. In retrospect, I can see how these expectations were shaped by the idea that intimacy must be exclusive, oriented towards couplehood. Anything else – friendship or shared presence – was rendered peripheral, not because it lacked intimacy, but because it refused the shape that I had been taught to recognise.

Recently, a conversation with a close friend highlighted how my expectations of intimacy have shifted. Friendships are no longer a lesser substitute for romance, but sites of intimacy in their own right. Through the lens of queer theorists like Lauren Berlant and Alison Kafer, intimacy looks less like a dramatic culmination of linear expectations of companionship and more like a practice of care that opens up alternate possibilities of world-building. This is not to say that I no longer desire romantic relationships, or that digital connection has rendered physical touch obsolete. I still crave being held and being able to reach for someone without negotiating screens and time zones. I am still aware of the things that these digital spaces cannot offer. But logging onto Discord has changed how that absence feels. In these spaces, care circulates without exclusivity and a presence does not demand possession. They provide a scaffolding of support that keeps me upright as I navigate my loneliness.

However, I cannot ignore that this digital architecture is a site of contradiction. The ‘access intimacy’ that I find here is hosted on platforms built for neoliberal surveillance and powered by hardware born of colonial extraction. My relief is entangled with the exploitation of lands and bodies far from my own. The tools that keep me ‘anchored’ are part of an imperial framework that commodifies human connection and is responsible for the loneliness pandemic we are currently facing. To find care here is to exist within a friction – acknowledging that my digital sanctuary is a fragile, often problematic refuge.
Yet, when I turn on my laptop at 8 p.m., I am not escaping my life, I am tending to it. The soft ‘bloop’ of Discord does not promise a cure for loneliness, but it offers something steadier: an intimacy that does not require the exhausting energy of platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp. For someone living with the precarity of visas and temporary homes, this continuity matters. Here, intimacy arrives without spectacle: familiar voices in my headphones and a game saved exactly where we left it off. For now, it is enough to know that intimacy can be found in the steady glow of a screen, waiting to welcome me home – wherever home may be.

Cover image by Gavin Phillips on Unsplash