Notes to Self — On Empathy and the Sensual
It’s cold outside and warm under this blanket, and I miss the feeling of being nuzzled, and I miss being held.
I miss the eruptions of laughter, the curses, and the moans that made these thin walls vibrate and jarred the floor.
A rush of impressions arrives as I feel the weightiness of this body — my shoulders tense from a long day. The gentle release as I sink in a warm bath and how water fills every curve and crevice— and suddenly intimacy makes itself available. My skin comes alive in dampness and in heat.
The light — catching glimpses of the ethereal amidst the acridness of domesticity. The electric — the hairs on the back of my neck rising in alertness.
My whole body responds to subtle changes around me — Some of which I come to know through the sudden bouts of sadness or anger or solace or joy — which I’ve only picked up for however long the commute was today.
Some of us see things with our stomachs — things that cannot be spoken because the organic unburdens us of the polite.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it? So may I share your tears this one time, and may I hold your sorrow close to my chest until it is bearable once more.
Is it a necessary condition — the flipside of vulnerability — that I touch those strangers as if they were extensions of myself? It’s impossible to ignore the very matter-of-fact presence of their bodies around me. Impossible to filter the hundreds of separate looks across time that synthesize my living impression of them. Their airborne emotions spilling out from open pores— can I even speak out loud of this kind of contamination?
Something like collage is at the heart of the process of perception — and I’ve never been skilled at curating the small moments that make up the whole picture.
How strange reality is when we look at people rather than through them.
Some days, I am aware of being empty — in ways that make me feel more alive.
When I walk, my mind goes blank, and I am aware of my own animality, hunting for survival. My tenderness frightens me, and I’m haunted by the wildness that nourishes and sustains me. That which knows before the mind can rationalize, which chases pleasure and flees from pain.
Yes, oooh, baby, you fit perfectly in me — the frictional music of an extended moan that hushes the ones listening, eavesdroppers wanting more because life is expansive, and pleasure grows exponentially just like pain does. Through pleasure, we exit the linear trajectory of productive time, and a single moment may unravel to infinity and spiral upwards. Sensuality is the counter-friction that stretches moments and hangs minutes to dry.
Pleasure is unruly, indescribably real.
It carves out a foreign language that makes the whole of our vocabulary topple into silence. Pleasure expands inside our bodies, growing and developing. It also expands in territory; creating new spaces to host that which makes us reach out to one another for warmth.
Sex is a dance where we receive from others what others have created and give them the best of our own creation too. So spare this body from living in isolation, under arrest inside myself. May I find myself in alterity: the Other who also loves and hates, fears and has courage.
There is a dialogue to be had that only the people here present can possibly have.