I need to be quiet with you. Exactly like this, without preambles, like someone opening the door to a room where the furniture has already lost the dust of certainties. Letting the fingertips trace love songs on the skin, not out of an urgency to touch, but because the skin is the only map that dispenses with the legend. Let my fingertips trace love songs on your skin.

There is a clandestine territory where words stumble and fall to their knees, exhausted from meaning. Cortázar knew this well; the best encounters happen in the cracks, in the unspoken paragraphs, in those moments when the chronopope falls silent and the clay of the world dissolves. The eyes create a poetry of their own, clumsy and urgent, looking deep into the other without asking grammar for permission. Let my eyes create poetry with their gaze.

Suddenly, hearts begin to dance and flutter to the rhythm of silence, like jazz played at dawn, muffled between the sheets and the erratic ticking of the clock on the wall. Let our hearts dance and flutter to the sound of silence so that we may learn a quiet love. Because learning to love in silence is accepting that not everything needs to fit on the tip of the tongue.

Words have their value, of course — they serve to buy bread, discuss train schedules, invent excuses for loneliness, or name the small things on the surface. Words can be beautiful, but they don’t belong in that place, my love. There, at the bottom of the well where one discovers oneself, they sound false, too heavy, like lead shoes at a barefoot party.

Let’s save speech for the smaller adventures of the sidewalk, for the casual joke at the cafe, for the silly fight over which direction to take at the corner. Let’s save them for smaller adventures than discovering each other…

Discovering the other is a mute abyss, a dive with open eyes into dark water, where only suspended breathing and a slow touch know the way back.

© Beatriz Esmer