writing :: Federico Sabatini

TO MAKE LOVE WITH A STRANGER

I woke up with a strong erection this morning.
I still have it now while I’m working. It’s odd to stand in an empty place with an erection. Especially when you thought that your body had died.
A few people have arrived in the museum. They all look miserable and I really enjoy looking at them. Only to point out the difference with the way I look.
Today I’m present, I’m real. I can look at them and be happy for their sadness. I guess my eyes can cut their faces.
I’m very happy that they despise me. And I love them for despising me. For making me understand that I’m not like them.
This morning I’m happy because yesterday night I made love.
Not sex, only love.
Even if it was physical, it was nothing but love. Pure and total love.
It’s the first time something like this happened and I’m wondering if it really exists. If it has existed.
Everything seemed real yesterday night, but everything seems metaphorical today. Especially if I think of this snow, which has been covering the city while we were together.
Only my excitement and my erection are real now. They are the only proof that something happened to me. Something I want to preserve. Something that made me happy. That is making me happy.
We met here yesterday, in the afternoon.
Me: standing at the entrance of the exhibition, tearing the tickets.
Him: entering the exhibition, showing his ticket.
- Hi.
- Hi.
Normally, I don’t welcome customers when I’m at the entrance. I don’t even notice their faces. I just tear their tickets, it’s very easy.
I had seen him before, while he was walking through the corridor which leads to the exhibition. He was not only beautiful, there was something in the way he walked that really caught my attention. I just couldn’t avoid talking to him.
Just before entering, he glanced at my eyes and I felt he had just looked behind them.
I started to think a lot and to question about physical attraction. I know I will never find an explanation but I will never cease to think of it.
After a while, he came back to the entrance.
- I can’t concentrate. Can I come back in about one hour?
- Of course you can.
Words didn’t make any sense to me. Not even to him, I believe. It was only an obvious matter of looks. And emotions, covering our skins.
After one hour I was again inside the exhibition .
I was feeling tired, I haven’t been sleeping much lately. The only thing I could do was to stare at the wooden floor and think of him. No energy for something more.
He just interrupted my absence of feelings by appearing in front of my body, pretending to look at the pictures while glancing at me. Discreetly. Almost spying.
The space of this exhibition is strange. Like a stage. It doesn’t give you any chance to hide yourself.
You are in an open space where everybody can carefully observe you. If they want.We both started to dance.
In a strange way. Slowly, like in a musical ritual from some ancient civilization. We moved symmetrically from one corner to another. Meeting by the center of the room, hardly touching each other and then, quickly separating and going back to our slow movements.
Eyes, looks, legs, hands and mouths. Everything involved in our ballet but sounds.
After thirty minutes, I had to change rooms, since my job requires me to. I thought that his reaction while I was going away would be meaningful.
He just followed me. Elegantly. And came to talk to me with an excuse.
He blushed all over his face and spoke with a childishly trembling voice.
We arranged a rendezvous soon after work.
My day went very quickly.
My mind totally forgot about time and kept thinking of this boy arrived from nothingness.
I thought he wasn’t real, maybe my mind is getting so disturbed that I am starting to have visions. I started to convince myself that nobody would be at the rendezvous, just to feel more relaxed.
But he was really there, alone and brighter than before.
He’s young, ash-blond, black-eyed and sexily built. The contrast of colour between his black eyebrows and his hair makes you stare at his eyes. They are dark and intense. They express a strong inner life and many more things that can’t be communicated.
We went to a pub and started a superficial conversation, feeling very tense and pretending to feel at ease. I didn’t know him and didn’t know if I wanted to.
I just liked him when he was silent and unconsciously moved his fleshy lips.
- When are you leaving the city?
- Tomorrow, in the morning.
- We only have twelve hours left.
- It’s not too bad, we can make them last longer, I guess.
- Natürlich. (Of course.)
The more I’m writing, the more I’m disturbed by my erection.
It seems to be endless.
My penis is almost beating and I’m feeling happy. It means I’m alive.
It’s a very pleasurable pain. I never imagined pain could be so pleasurable.
We went to my place.
In the tube, we never stopped looking at each other. And all the other people suddenly disappeared, even though they were close to us. They were extremely close. But they ceased to exist.
Sometimes this city doesn’t exist at all. It’s only a product of the perception of your feelings, a stage for your private sensations.
We had dinner, and while he was eating, he was explaining why he couldn’t live here.
- Too many visual stimula, too much to be absorbed by, troppe cose....I guess if you are tense, it would drive you mad. It would be hard for me...wirklich unmöglich...impossibile.
After a while, the conversation’s intensity really increased. All of a sudden. I suppose it was a matter of time. Of the lack of time.
Love, sex, confusion, society, music, films, literature and aesthetics. Everything was coming out from our mouths, naturally. And, pleasurably, from our brains.
I had the impression I had known him for ages. And, yet, he was a stranger. A stranger who kept drawing near to me on the sofa. Looking at me with wide piercing eyes. Asking for contact. Any kind of contact. Of intimate contact.
He had never made love before. This was his most personal confession to me. To a stranger.
- Only to a girl, actually. But it wasn’t a worthwhile experience. I actually slept with a man as well. I didn’t think he wanted sex...then he touched me and pulled my pants down. As soon as he put his hand on my penis, I felt so bad and moved his hand out. I was very young at that time. I’m still very young actually. Un bambino...
He was really young. So young that I was surprised when he told me. His words and movements mirrored a much more mature experience.
Only a gap of six years between us.
If I think of myself six years ago, however, I can see the difference. Clearly.
At that time I was still a virgin. Physically and mentally.
And I wished to make love to a boy similar to me. Desperately.
Eventually, I went with the first one I met, and found him disgusting.
All of a sudden, I thought that boy was my revenge. The revenge destiny was giving me to annihilate my revolting youthful experience. The boy became myself in the past, the one I totally forgot. And whom, thanks to the boy, I was perfectly remembering.
Me, I became the boy I had been desperately missing when I was his age. The one I met much later. Too much later.
Everything came spontaneously. No thinking involved.
I thought I had to make him feel fine, I had to be generous with him. So that I could also be generous with me.
Love is always a selfish thing, after all.
In bed, we lay for a long while.
Both in our pants and t-shirts, sitting in front of each other. Talking.
The conversation had become meaningless again. We spoke the same languages and we mixed them all up, all the time. And ended up speaking none.
English was meant to become our only mutual native one, but to a certain extent it is impossible. It will never be enough.
We really had to change our communicative means, in order to get to something deeper. As we both wished.
So, I kissed him.
Gently, hardly touching his lips. Without using any other parts of my body.
When our mouths touched, I felt some kind of electricity through my spine. The same one you feel when you are innocent and experience your body for the first time. And the body of someone else. When sex is still an adult thing. Only.
I felt younger and excited and I kissed him again, just a bit more strongly.
He didn’t open his mouth. So, I stopped and opened my eyes. His skin went totally red, all his face was like burning, even his forehead and his ears. He looked at me, silently. And he didn’t seem scared, as I was expecting. He seemed surprised. Puzzled. Happy.
Me, I was more surprised. More puzzled. Happier.
- I’m quite ashamed of being naked.
- Don’t need to...Warum? (Why?)
- Well...insomma...
- Your body is beautiful.
- Deiner auch. (Yours too.)
- Deiner ist besser. (Yours is better.)
I kissed him again and switched the light off.
After we made love, he kissed me briefly and suddenly fell asleep.
I was too ecstatic to sleep. I turned around, lay on my back and stared at the white ceiling of my tiny room. All the rest was covered with dark. Even the shape of his body under my duvet.
After a while I didn’t see the white wall anymore. Like on a screen, I saw the images of my youth, one after another, in a chronological order. I saw all my teen-age fears. My painful loves, my joys, all those emotions which marked my body.
At once, I realised how much I have changed in six years since I was nineteen.
And I realised that mental and physical changes can be scary, if you look at them carefully.
I didn’t feel nostalgic at all. Only astonished. Numb. In a very pleasurable way. I felt I was a living being. I have a past, which, though negative, has built up a real person. A person who doesn’t belong to that past. Who doesn’t need that past. But, still, comes from that past.
A person who can give love to such a beautiful creature and make it sleep peacefully.
While he was sleeping, he didn’t move at all. His head on my shoulder made me perceive the line of his profile. His eyelashes seemed longer than I remembered.
I recalled that when I was his age, I was really obsessed by touching male bodies. It was the only fantasy over which I masturbated.
All of a sudden, my mind went back to those years. And my body as well. I was that boy again. That boy who wanted to touch.
I was shivering when my hand went on his hip. Then on his arse and finally on his pubic hair.
At first, he pretended to sleep. He was finding it pleasurable but was ashamed to admit it.
My hand was delicately exploring his body. My caresses were so delicate that they became much stronger than a proper sexual behaviour.
From his legs, I eventually went to his penis. It was hard.
He couldn’t pretend to be sleeping any more. So, he turned around and kissed me. And touched me. And licked me.
Me, I was losing my senses. I wasn’t thinking of my past any more. I was in my past. My emotions became as strong as when I was like him.
Nineteen. Pure. Innocent. Amazingly perceptive.
I didn’t sleep at all.
At one point I stood up. I wanted to see more light and went upstairs, in the lounge. I sat on the sofa, where I had been with him.
I lit a cigarette. The smell of smoke was melting with his own smell I had on my fingers. I felt delighted.
Then, I looked out of the window. The cars of my neighbours were frozen, and I saw an odd light.
I went closer: it was snowing. The yellow light of the street lamps was less bright. A blurred vision.
I stayed there long, even after the cigarette extinguished. Just thinking that it was very romantic. My brain was too beautifully numb to see other connections.
Again, I thought that boy was only a product of my imagination, of the stories I would like to tell and that never happen. And that I never tell.
- Maybe I won’t find anybody in the room, I thought.
He was still there, though. I could see his body in the dark, its formless shape under the covers. I went to bed and he came closer, saying that it was cold.
I fell asleep and slept for two hours. Until the alarm clock rang.

When I woke up this morning, I had completely forgotten about the snow. In the same way you normally forget about beautiful dreams.
When I went upstairs, I saw that everything was covered with white. It was so incredibly real. Pure. Luminous.
In this city it never snows, it only rains.
I believe destiny is still playing games with me. It will never stop.
Coincidences still make me see reality.
I left the boy three hours ago. Maybe four. Maybe I haven’t left him at all.
While I’m standing in this gallery, I can’t help thinking of him. I can’t think of anything else.
I see his face, sad, uncertain, while he’s waving from the bus. I listen to the words he said when we parted.
- Ciao a presto. I’ll send you an e-mail...
I never thought clichés could really exist.
I’m not sad at all, anyway. I’m filled with mental pleasure.
My friends keep talking to me but I can’t listen to them. Not today. It’s just him, just his voice that I want to hear.
Sometimes I think of the reactions of my mind. And I feel useless for not understanding anything.
The boy left and I won’t see him again, since he lives faraway. But I’m happy.
I know I didn’t meet a stranger. I just met myself. One of my selves, whom I hated. We had an argument once. Now we are friends again. We are both pure. Again.

My erection is still very present.
I know I would love to make love to him again. But it doesn’t matter.
I know he’s in a plane now and he’s thinking of me. I feel his mind above myself.
And I’m excited. I remember every single action and I’m excited.
Strange. What we did it’s none of my erotic fantasies.
And, yet, it makes me horny.
My heart is saturated with sexual memories. And my penis is just an extension of it. As it has always been.
Thinking of love makes me feel hornier than thinking of sex.
I suppose, purity is a very exciting kind of perversion.

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