At the beginning…
You said you wanted the key to my heart.
Those very words. Whispered as your lips hovered above the skin that masked what you so desired. It was like asking for my blood. As if you needed it to sustain you, to survive. But would I survive it? And the thought, unbidden, that surely, this must be the end. Where could we go from here?
“What if there’s more than one?” I asked
You lay beside me, our faces two pale moons in the dimming light of the room.
“How many?”
“There are four chambers in the heart, perhaps that’s the number. Maybe less, or more.”
“How could there be more?” You sounded incredulous and I smiled. You were always one for logic.
“Rooms within rooms.”
Your mouth curved, your eyes a shining black. My heart was trying to reach you through the red smudged mark of your kiss, my blood coursing a tributary that moved to and away from this pumping mass.
An ebb and flow of a sea inside me.
“Whatever it takes.”
Your response. It was almost a challenge.
So I said, not exactly sure whether I was stalling: “We’ll meet, like this, every night and I’ll tell you a story. A story that might hold a key. Or more than one.”
You lay your palm against the crescent of my cheek, sealing a pact without any sense of what was to come.
Room of Earth
First night
“It began…”
You held your breath as I spoke. Our faces were so close I could feel the absence of breath, the immediate chill from when you inhaled the air between us.
“Yes?”
I sighed to feel the heat again, my skin meeting it with its own flush.
“It began after my father died.”
You pressed your hand lightly along my neck, fingers threading through my hair. I could barely breathe to speak as your body stretched to become a taut drawn length against mine.
“I remember at the time all I wanted was to feel. Anything. I was numb to the point of not feeling solid or real. I existed as if the world couldn’t touch me. Then one day, I was sitting at a café and I saw a man. Youngish, ageless. He was wearing sunglasses and a white shirt that blazed in the sun. Even behind his glasses, I could feel him looking at me. I didn’t think. I went to sit at his table and he asked if I wanted a drink. I’d never done anything like that before. He didn’t seem surprised. His hand was resting on the table. He was waiting. For something. Someone. Maybe for me.”
I shut my eyes, not wanting to see the slightest change in your expression, how your eyes creased to frown; how you were almost willing the words from my mouth.
“Then I reached for his hand. Again, I didn’t think. It was pure instinct. I felt the dryness of his skin. Nothing more. My hand was merely a weight, a nerveless dull thing, dead. His fingers curled into mine. He was silent, but between us, we’d already agreed what was to come.”
I opened my eyes quickly. It startled you. For this, I had to look directly at you.
“There was a hotel nearby. Cheap. You could rent a room by the hour, or stay without any purpose for any length of time. It was a place devoid of sentiment, atmosphere. An in between kind of place. He took my hand and before we said a word, our two bodies were already in one of the anonymous hotel rooms, entwined on a bed.”
You held my gaze, but your eyes narrowed, tense. Uncertain.
“Perhaps it was fitting that we went there. Impersonal. It was like I could vacate my body; who I was. I could be anyone. And the room was a reflection of that; empty but for the basic necessities: a double bed, the sheets and pillowslips white, no blanket because it was the height of summer. The floor was a cheap tile and a door opened to an ensuite, only big enough for a washbasin, shower and toilet. The window was open but the shutters were closed.”
Your chest rose and fell, unevenly.
“He undressed me. He sat me on the bed and then pushed me ever so lightly so I was lying down. He was gentle, as if he sensed I was as fragile as the connection between us. We didn’t speak, as if words would have cut the fine thread of an unspoken understanding.”
I could almost see the withdrawal in your eyes. And the spark of heat. Yes, desire. Your hand trailed along my neck to my arm, and you held me, an increasing pressure.
“He took his clothes off and placed his shoes together, neatly, by the bed. He was already aroused. He lay against me and he looked into my face. A question. When he began to move, my body felt resistant, as inert as stone. He was a blanket of earth that could smother or simply warm me.”
You moved to roll me beneath you. As if to counteract my words, a kind of proof of the distance between then and now.
“His body quaked. It convulsed. It registered in my mind like a shock, to feel the energy of his release. I gasped to feel it although my own body felt a lead weight that could sink us both. It was stunning. To hold onto him and feel him. How his movements began to slow, how he rocked against me and I just held him.”
Your eyes were depthless, your mouth open with an unspoken question. Or, just a sound.
“I’d never witnessed that kind of vulnerability before. It was a gift. I kissed him then. The first and last time that night. When he dressed to leave he put his shoes on last. As if they anchored him.”
You were almost breathless when you asked: “And?” Already rushing towards our own climax before we’d even begun. I placed my hand at the curving base of your spine, and it bowed. Bone pliable as clay.
“My body—briefly I felt its connection to this earth, the roots that dig deep but that aspire to reach above.”
Skin. Flesh. Bone.
“A shell that can break.”
And before you finally touched your lips against mine, I could barely hear you, “Matter can bend.”
“Equally fragile,” I breathed.
Room of Water
Second night
“Hold me.”
You slid your arms around me, our limbs entwined. My mouth hovered near the skin at the base of your throat.
“The next night I went to the hotel by myself. The apartment that I lived in with my father was as dark and ominous as a cave. The room I rented faced onto the plaza. I opened the shutters so I could see the sky. There was a breeze coming off the sea.”
I could feel the heat of breath on the crown of my head as you exhaled. Your heartbeat pulsed in your neck.
“What happened?”
“I went and had a meal at the café where I’d met the man. I watched as couples, or a small group ate and drank. I was the only one dining alone. And I felt it. To the core. That sense of being alone, with no one to know where I was, whether I was safe; that I was alive. And then he came. The man from the day before. He stood at the edge where the lights of the café pooled and flooded and then seeped into the dark. He was watching me. I never thought I’d see him again.”
You tensed. I couldn’t see your eyes. But you held me.
“I went to him. He held my hand and we walked to the hotel, up the stairs, to the room. We said nothing. Like the night before. We sat on the bed and he placed his hand on my cheek. The touch was so tender, so unexpected, I began to cry.”
My breath was caught in the well at the base of your neck and my face felt warm, your skin looked moist. You were stroking the small of my back, and then your fingers began making small circles, soothing.
“He kept his hand on my face and the tears slid over his fingers. He took his shoes off and his jacket, it was linen, a soft blue. And then he held me and we were lying, facing each other on the bed. He curled me into him like the petals of a flower closing against the night. I was still crying. I thought my tears would surely drown us and leak onto the floor.”
A deep, deep sigh shuddered through you.
“Why?”
“I felt so alone. My father was gone. I was staying in a city where so few knew me. I was studying there at the time. It was a place that my father loved, had brought me to live there with him. Now he was gone and I was on my own. I was grieving. But that man, he’d come back. I never thought I would see him again.”
You held your breath then, as if holding the words, the questions I could imagine forming in your mind: What did you feel? How did he make you feel? I placed my hand on your face, tilting my head just as you bent to look at me. Your eyes were dark with sadness. You’d always sensed the heaviness of my father’s death, a distressing weight in my life.
“That’s all he had to do. To be there. For me. To touch my face. To hold me so that his body became a shell I could curl into. I could feel. I wasn’t numb. I ached and I hurt. But for a moment, I didn’t feel alone.”
Another question, a shift in your eyes, imperceptible. This time you tried to voice it.
“Did you…?”
I didn’t think you could say the words. What were the right words? That night wasn’t about sex. It wasn’t about love, but there was intimacy.
“No. He held me until I fell asleep. I remember his shirt was soaked from my tears, and the sheet. I didn’t hear him leave. When I woke, he was gone.”
Your fingers traced beneath my eyes. Along the bridge of my nose then dipped to my mouth. You rested them on my lips.
A simple touch that resonated completely.
Room of the Circle
Third night
“The next night was a test.”
We lay, side by side on our backs, our hands touching beneath the sheet. Your eyes were closed as you listened.
“I came back from a walk along the beach. He was seated at the café and I stood, watching him before he finally saw me. He got up and walked towards me and he took my hand. There was an understanding between us. This time the room faced towards the back of the hotel, closed in, tight as a drum. We sat on the bed, our hands still clasped.”
Your fingers scraped across the palm of my hand before sliding to fit like two pieces of a puzzle.
“Go on,” you whispered.
“And he asked, ‘Do you trust me?’ Suddenly I was locked, frozen, unable to move. His words cut into the lulling sensation of his touch. Because I didn’t know this man. That was my immediate thought. I do not know you. I had known a kind of intimacy, seen him at his most unguarded, vulnerable and yet, we knew nothing of each other. I tried to speak, my mouth drained dry.”
You turned to me, lying on your side, still holding my hand awkwardly.
“‘I don’t know you,’ I finally said. His hand moved slowly to my face and I flinched. I was flooded with heat and sweat and an icy taste like blood in my mouth. It was fear.”
You didn’t move but I could hear your breathing, ragged, as if you were unsure whether to make a sound. Whether to say, ‘go on’ or ‘stop’.
“He said, ‘No, you don’t. Yet you risked your very life the day we met.’ And I had. Numbed by grief, I didn’t care whom I was with as we lay together. Our unknowing had stripped us of all inhibition. Neither of us moved until he asked, ‘Do you want to know me?’ I realised that this was the test. Not a game, but a point, like the edge of a knife which could go either way. An end, or a beginning. I was oddly calm. Unsure. He’d had no place in my life until two days ago and yet, I had felt more in those two encounters than I had in the weeks since my father’s death. It was a leap and I was blind enough to take it. A part of me was still numb and caring too little of my sense of safety, but daring myself to test the boundaries, to try. ‘How do we begin?’ I asked. This time he placed his hand on my face and I let him. ‘We already have,’ was his reply.”
You released my hand and bent your arm to raise yourself. I couldn’t help but look at your face. I was scared to see what might be there. Disgust? Disbelief? Condemnation? But no, you were curious and cautious.
“Why? Why take such a risk?”
For a moment I was lost in your eyes, silvery dark tonight. The moon was full and high and we needed no artificial light.
“Because I wanted to know,” I said simply. Slowly, you nodded. Perhaps you could even understand.
“He reached to hold me, to circle me in his arms like he had the day before and I placed my ear over his heart to hear the soughing pulse, the rhythmic thud. He wasn’t calm. He was shivering. For a moment, disbelieving, I was certain he was scared.”
You moved your other hand and placed it where you knew my heart to be. At first light, and then a weight that I welcomed.
“And were you scared?”
I remembered how my heart had tripped at the quiver in his body. How uncertain we both were at that moment, each of us standing either side of a deep ravine that we had to leap, to meet the other on the opposite side. So who would be the first to jump? Or did we both have to leap to fall?
“Yes, I was.”
“So why continue?”
I placed my hand over yours. “Tell me this. Doesn’t trusting another frighten you?’ You were quiet and I went on. “How do you know whether you can be sure that someone is trustworthy, no matter how you feel?”
You were still silent.
“I think the test was my own. In trusting you can be proven wrong or right. Either way, it is a risk. He knew that. How to begin to be with someone, you walk that edge until experience, time allows for something more knowing, binding, to replace it.”
You moved your head only slightly, but your eyes caught the full moon as if they were lit from within. It was blinding.
“I see,” you said and then you rested your head on the curve where my neck dipped to my shoulder. “I think I know what you’re saying.”
At that moment, it had to be enough.
Room of Air
Fourth night
You waited, listening for the slight intake of breath that would signal the continuation of this tale with a sound, a word.
“The following night we agreed to meet at the café. I had spent the day at the art school, and he had his work. He told me he was a writer and an academic. He had a position at the university. The café was a place he came to regularly as it was by the beach and he liked to sit and listen to the water, the air, the sounds.”
We faced each other but there was a space between us. I could see the wariness in your eyes, flat, matt dark. This was no longer a simple encounter. It had weight with the beginning of knowing the other. I could sense you wondering where this was going, what the possibilities could be. Such knowing can deepen or separate.
“I was nervous, and when I was anxious my breathing would become shallow. It felt like wings were beating sporadically in my chest. When he arrived he smiled and there was no hesitation. That gentled me and I could suddenly feel the air slip into my chest with ease. He sat and began immediately to talk about what he’d written that day. About what lectures he’d given. The words wove into ordering our meal, questions about my course and what I hoped to do and then as the wine loosed a languid sensation through my limbs, the words became sounds, and it was like a sensuous dance.”
You were very still but I could see how your hand resting in the space between us on the bed moved a little towards me, how your fingers bent to lightly scrape the sheet. Yet you said nothing.
“We exchanged what many people might when they first meet, and yet the knowledge wasn’t what embedded into my mind, into thoughts. It was the sound of his voice, the ease with which he spoke and the lightness in his laughter. There was his silence when he listened and then it was my voice I was hearing, a higher register, softer, less determined, perhaps less sure.”
You sighed then, the expelled air touched my face, and my lips became dry.
“There were pauses. He ate hungrily, drank sparingly, but occasionally I had a sense of what I’d call harmony.”
The bed jarred with your sudden movement. You propped your head up with your hand, elbow denting the mattress. There was impatience, but an intent searching in your gaze.
“What do you mean by that—harmony?”
“A sense of being in tune. What I said, I felt him listening, his attention, but it was more than that. He wanted to understand and that alone reeled me in. He was giving me something—his wanting to know, his interest, his time. And I was giving something to him. There was a resonance between us and it was unexpected. And welcome.”
A hint of a smile on your lips, perhaps you were thinking of how that could be said of us. But also, the times when there was much discord.
“It was, strangely, a delightful evening. We decided to go back to the hotel rather than to his apartment or the apartment I had rented with my father and that I had decided to keep despite his leaving. We were still in a state of suspension. Neither of us having stepped solidly into the other’s life. But that night, we didn’t need to speak, there were the sounds of a different pleasure in being with each other, and how the breeze from the open window coming directly off the sea folded with our bodies. Except this night, he whispered my name, over and over and it was like he was tying me to him, throwing a line across the distance of our separateness to begin to be with me.”
We were momentarily silent. As if suspended in the absence of my voice, in the air shifting the feather light curtain.
“We fell asleep, listening to the sound of each other breathing.”
Lifting your hand you traced my face with the lightest touch, curling strands of my hair behind my ear. Then you kissed me and with a slight pressure my mouth opened and there were no words for this.
Breath shared as if we could give to each other what we needed most to live.
Room of Fire
Fifth night
“We went swimming in the sea. For one day I didn’t think of anything but the feel of the water, the freedom to move, of time suspended.”
You were stretched beside me with your arms bent and positioned behind your head like wings. I reached to touch the skin as it stretched and dipped from your ribs to your stomach. You closed your eyes and smiled. I rested my hand just below your naval. Here, I could feel the pulse of your heart.
“We went back to his apartment. There was barely any furniture. The bedroom was similar to the hotel for only having the essentials. The bed was positioned in the centre of the room. There was an armoire. A chair. He opened the windows and shutters to the night. I could still feel the sea on my skin.”
You were still smiling, knowing how well I loved the sea. You placed your hand over mine, skin hot to the touch.
“He asked if he could blindfold me.”
“What?” Your eyes were wide and you sat up. Wary, disbelieving.
“And I was to blindfold him.”
Your lips parted to speak and yet, nothing came. My hand pressed against your chest so that you lay back and I moved to straddle you, my body a slight weight. I placed my hands to cover your eyes.
“‘Imagine,’ he said. ‘Imagine me in your mind.’ We lay close to each other and then he touched my face and his other hand reached for mine and placed it, almost identically on his. And so it began, a journey through touch. As he moved, I did and yet for each of us it was completely unique. His hands left a trail like a lit fuse. My skin was alive. Electric.”
Your heart quickened, blood and heat suffused your skin and then mine. When I moved, my skin slipped against yours.
“It could have been hours, but I lost all sensation of time. I lost all sense of the edges of myself. I was heat and light. I was the ebb and flow of the sea. I was pure thought. I was a spark fanned to a flame.”
There was a thread of moisture above your lip. I pressed my mouth against yours to taste it.
“And?” You breathed-spoke, not wanting to release my mouth. Slowly, I uncovered your eyes and you startled at the light. Eyes glistening, all desire and need.
“It felt like there was no before or after, just now. Pure sensation that cut clean through all my resistance, doubts and fears. I was laid bare. I was alive.”
Room of lovers
Sixth night
“Were you lovers?”
I almost hesitated. Yes. “As I understood it then.”
“What do you mean?”
We were holding each other, as we had that night when you first asked for the key. I closed my eyes, not sure I could speak clearly if I looked directly into yours.
“I thought I was losing myself. In him. That I wanted to…”
“Desire?” Your voice sounded thin, as if straining against the words. Resisting.
“More than that. There was a sense of finding myself in him. Like he was a piece to myself that I only realised in meeting him, that I needed to feel more solid. Present.”
I opened my eyes and you were guarded and also struggling not to react. It’s never easy to hear the one you love speaking of being with another. We want honesty, and we don’t want it at the same time.
“There was a connection and it deepened. There were moments I felt completely attune to him and wondered how I could ever have been alone before. Sometimes it was passionate need, but there were times of a pure contentment.”
We were touching; the pull between us was greater than skin pressing against skin. It was magnetic. It was blood.
“Was that not love?”
We were tiptoeing. Speaking of the very energy that had spurred you to ask for the key: ineffable, binding and incontrovertible, prompting fear. Of the loss of it.
“There was one night when we lay together sleeping, and I was never sure if I was awake or dreaming, but I could hear a violin. It was possible, but it was the sensation, like a thread of sound that wound its way through the room to me. I was drifting and then submerged in the sensation, the sound, the vibration.”
There was a crease between your eyes. These were not words of romance.
“Yet, amidst that there was a stark impression, like a jarring note in a dream. I looked at his sleeping face, could feel him against me and around me and I felt a horrible sense that he was still a stranger to me.”
You were obviously puzzled. I could read the consternation as my words spoke of a melting of my self, of a union that was so easily undermined.
“It doesn’t make sense,” you said simply.
I smiled. “No, it didn’t. And it happened, oddly, after we’d been intimate physically or even, while we were sleeping, or simply walking silently together. This sensation would sever what connection I thought was there and I felt flung away at a distance. There were times I thought I was hovering above myself observing.”
“You didn’t love him?” It was logical to assume.
“I don’t believe I knew myself very well. I’m not sure I could truly appreciate myself.”
“Meaning?”
“I wasn’t content enough to be fully present, able to be alone – with him—with myself. Losing myself—it was simply that. It felt like surrender. Falling. Almost freeing. A kind of happiness. But I don’t think I knew who I was well enough to truly give myself and stay whole.”
The creases in your face eased visibly. I could almost hear a quiet ‘ah’ of understanding.
“But there was a thread, a connection, and sometimes I called it love.”
Your mouth looked tender. As if our thoughts were in sync you touched my lips, traced them gently.
“And now? What would you call it now?”
“No comparison. There’s nothing to compare.”
Room of Mutual Destruction
Seventh night
I was quiet for a long time. It settled between us, cold and hard.
“One night he wanted us to meet at the hotel.”
I spoke as I thought, in fragments, shards of memory, smashed beyond recognition.
“I remember feeling uncertain. We hadn’t been there for some time and I hesitated before agreeing to see him.”
“Why?” There was something detached in how you asked that. As unwilling as I was to enter into this. We both lay there with our eyes fixed on the darkened space of the room.
“A feeling.”
A feeling as heavy and flat as dread. Perhaps it had been the way he had asked, a command almost. The slightest inflection that chilled. How easily he could speak to me like that. How it severed any affection.
“When I entered the room it was dark. He was sitting on the bed, naked. There was nothing welcoming in his expression, no warmth. No connection. Almost as if he didn’t recognise me.”
I felt a roiling tide in my stomach rising up my throat. It was acid hot and burning. I’d felt the same that night. And the sensation of the ground plummeting beneath me, like I was falling.
“I stood at the door. I couldn’t move. He sat while I stood and neither of us said anything for a long time. ‘Let’s play a game,’ he finally said. I barely managed to say, ‘Let’s not’. He laughed at that. I felt faint, like my head wasn’t attached to my body. His nakedness unnerved me because his voice, his face—it was like peering into a void.”
“Jesus,” you said, again almost too soft to hear. You were shaking your head, as if you didn’t want me to go on and I knew if I stopped, I wouldn’t.
“‘If I had a gun I’d suggest we play a game,’ he said, ‘where you spin the chamber and you dare the other person to pull the trigger.’ I was shaking my head, resisting everything, resisting all that he was saying. He continued, ‘To forfeit is to place your life in the other person’s hands. If you don’t pull the trigger, they will.’ My legs were shaking. My whole body was shaking. In the dark, I could barely recognise him. Everything I’d known. I felt emptied out. I was drained and left with this strange terror. Wondering where this was going.”
You turned to me then, your eyes anguished. “Don’t…”
I lay there and shook my head, at you, at the memories. Disbelief and a horrible thrill of saying the words that shaped it as real. I’d buried that moment, crushed it beyond recognition and hidden it from myself. Now, in the resurrection, I was purging myself in sharing such a shadow dark place that I’d inhabited, however brief.
“‘What’s the point?’ I asked. He laughed then, unmercifully. ‘The point is simply having the courage to pull the trigger.’ ‘That’s not courage,’ I said. His face went quite blank. ‘No, perhaps you’re right. Maybe it’s simply suspending any care in that moment whether you live, or whether you die. As blank as a chamber without a bullet that can spare you.’”
Your eyes never left my face and I didn’t flinch from your stare.
“Then he laughed. A kind of madness, hysteria. I was seeing him and I wasn’t. I felt disjointed, dislocated. I never took my eyes off him, never blinked, I just found the strength to reach for the door, to open it and I backed out of the room, shutting the door before I ran out of the hotel.”
I’d run for my life, seeing a twisted darkness in that man I’d so willingly gone to meet. Right then, in the hard line of your gaze I feared what you would think of me: that I would be with someone who had squandered everything, suggesting a game of life and death; who’d shown not a shred of care at what he was doing to me. Or, who had merely shown me the darkest recesses of his heart. A moment bitter and stark for the lack of care he’d revealed at whether he lived or died. Unveiling a wound I had never sensed within him. This was no game. There was no gun. He was laying bare such pain and despair in a callous and almost empty gesture of words, gambling life with death. And I'd left him in that dark room never thinking to help him, only to save myself.
“What else could you do?” My thoughts were that transparent to you.
“We’ll never know,” I said, resigned. In that moment, you cared enough to see into the darkness and to be silent, to let me be.
Last night
“It ended,” you said, a statement without the need for a response.
“As it began,” I said.
The question was in your eyes.
“After that night, I never saw him again. He called me, left a message pleading an apology, said we should meet so he could explain. But I never went. It was as simple as that.”
You were silent, unsure of the emotion, the feeling behind the words. My face felt still, like a pool of water, unruffled, quiet and deep.
“I did go one more time to the café. The sky was like a sea above me, descending, threatening to overcome me. I felt lost and anchored, quaking and still, absent and completely present. It was like tempting fate, knowing I’d never see him again but almost wanting proof. It was so complete, realising that fact, that I just sat at the table at the café where it had begun, and I didn’t feel the need to leave.”
I could hear the steadiness of your breathing, an echo to mine.
“I kept thinking, in the beginning was the end. How easily, swiftly it began, how easily it unravelled, came undone.”
We were on the bed, fully clothed. This was the night we had been coming to, the end of this tale, the end of…
“How did you feel?” Your voice wavered. Your gaze inscrutable. Inching towards what felt inevitable, and yet wanting to know. Wanting to know the end. Where we had come to.
“Calm, accepting and hollowed out. Like a ballooning space was filling me. Relief. And scared. Scared of what was to come. That I was alone again.”
You reached to hold my hand, your fingers tight, almost willing me to stay. Not to let go. I pulled our entwined hands to my chest. I was sure you could feel the steady beat. As sure as I could sense the pulse of your own through your grasp. What connects us?
Blood. Heart. Breath.
More. So much more.
“There’s no key,” I whispered.
I could feel how those words shivered across your skin. How much power I had to make you fear. How clarity was needed in all things said.
“There’s no secret. I’m all that you know, all that I say and all that is left unsaid.”
“What are you saying?” you asked, whispered. We strip ourselves to be vulnerable, we lay bare what we can endure to reveal, and we hope—for understanding, acceptance. For love.
“Isn’t it obvious to you? When I first saw you, this is how I felt.”
My heart was thrumming, too fast to sound a full beat, blood quickening. My body, an elemental alchemy: of fire, air, water, earth; of heat, breath, fluids, matter, distilled in that quickening to express what a word could never encapsulate. I pressed your hand, palm flat against my chest. So that you could feel.
We were silent, listening for what flowed between us.
“Yes,” you said. At once tremulous and certain. An affirmation and supplication. A hold and a release.
A key in a lock and a door opening wide.
Rebecca Horn, El Rio de la Luna, 1992
Multimedia installation, Barcelona, Spain
