The Moment

I whispered in your ear, barely a thread of a voice, so you would close your eyes.

As my hands lost themselves in your hair, slowly, without hurry, I breathed in the scent of your neck, like someone trying to hold in memory something they know can never happen again.

Your breathing gradually found mine. Two rhythms that had never been rehearsed and yet recognized each other. And in that meeting, something inside us grew still, as though the world, for once, had forgotten how to turn.

Your scent, your skin, the softness of your beard brushing my face… Everything was presence. Everything was moment. There was no yesterday or tomorrow, only that invisible territory opening between us.

Then I kissed you.

Slowly, tracing your lips with mine, letting our mouths learn the secret language of tenderness, that mingling of wonder and recognition of someone afraid to interrupt the miracle of being there.

There was no urgency. Only the desire to discover you without wresting answers from the mystery, to let the night unfold at its own pace, without asking the moment to be anything else.

I drew you toward me and found in your legs a place where time seemed to stop.

I wanted to follow the path of your body like someone crossing an unknown landscape.

My mouth descended slowly, pausing at every border, while my hands learned your geography, the delicate response of your skin, the language your body spoke long before words.

I watched you in wonder, as though desire had, for the first time, a visible form and I could contemplate its birth.

There was an uncontainable force in me, an impulse that came from somewhere before thought. I wanted to come closer, erase the last distance, feel that between us there remained no border that needed defending.

And then it happened:

I stopped thinking.

I closed my eyes and the darkness became infinite. It was not an absence of light, but a sky without edges, a universe unfolding behind my eyelids.

I felt my heart, in all its immensity, finally finding a place where it could expand without fear.

Now and then I opened my eyes to look at you.

And there you were, also suspended in that infinity, your gaze lost somewhere where explanations no longer existed.

Enraptured. On pause. Surrendered to the mystery.

We did not want to move. We wanted to let it happen, to let immensity do its work, to let it show us everything and nothing, the sacred chaos that lives at the center of all things.

Listening to our hearts mattered more than any movement. Feeling your breath within mine, yours finding refuge in my chest, was enough.

I carried you inside me and, at the same time, felt that something of me had been lost forever in you.

Not like someone disappearing, but like someone discovering that they can also exist beyond their own limits.

Then, inevitably, our bodies reclaimed their language. Desire flared again, and we began to move as though a secret music had begun to play beneath our skin.

Neither led. Neither decided. We were two wills ceasing to be wills, two tides learning to meet, swept along by an ancient current that needed no names.

We let ourselves be carried, spellbound, toward that edge where pleasure ceases to be only body and becomes vertigo, abandon, an inexplicable form of freedom.

Until, suddenly, my heart seemed to stop.

A moment.

An absolute silence at the center of the storm.

And then the tides came, with all their force, breaking within me the last shores.

I closed my eyes.

There was a white light, immense, and then a peace unlike anything I knew.

For a second, I was neither woman, nor body, nor thought.

I was only consciousness, suspended in a place without time, where nothing was missing and nothing needed to happen.

Sometimes I imagine that death must be something like that: a moment, a sigh, light making its way through every crack, and then, the serene invasion of a peace that no longer needs explanations.

And when I returned to earth, to your body, to your breathing, to the night that was still there, I understood something I still do not know how to name:

that there are encounters in which we make love not only with our skin, but also with what has no form within us.

That sometimes two bodies meet and, for a moment, the universe ceases to be immense because all of it fits in the space between them.

And that there are nights when touching someone is simply another way of brushing against the infinite.

Victoria Inaudi