Who ordered this cargo?

The late afternoon light had thickened in the corner of the room, a liquid honey that made the dust motes visible. I, seated on the same sofa as always, recorded the passage of the day not on a clock, but on my skin. The warmth changed, from lukewarm to hot, and then into a coolness that foretold the evening. This was the true diary: the body absorbing time, not the pen chasing after it. Yesterday, you left a book open on the armchair. This morning, I leafed through it. Your pencil underlinings were like fingerprints left on another's thoughts. I ran my fingertip over the raised paper, seeking the pressure of your hand, the direction of your gesture. That graphic, physical mark was more intimate than any word you could have written to me. It spoke of attention, of slowness, of a mind meeting another mind and leaving a secret trace. A second-degree eroticism, distilled. Then, the sound. Your step in the entrance, the jingle of keys on the marble table. I did not turn. I listened to your pause, that second of silence in which you sought me in the half-light. Hearing became the most vast skin, capable of sensing not the noise, but the intention behind it. The door to the room opened. Not a hole in the air, but a change in pressure. A wave that first lapped at my exposed ankles, then rose along my legs, my belly, until it made me hold my breath, while still staring at the same page without seeing a single letter. Desire, I understood in that instant, is not an arrow. It is a magnetic field. An alteration of space created when two bodies, even distant, recognize each other as poles. There is no need to touch. The true contact happens in the modified air between them, in that charged silence that precedes every gesture, and which contains, already perfect, all possible gestures. You said something, a triviality about traffic. Your voice was hoarse, tired. In that hoarseness, I heard the day that had passed, the words exchanged with others, the fatigue. And in that hearing, the purest desire was born: not to take, but to welcome. To be the place where that weariness could settle and become, finally, peace.

Refuse to be a silent cog in the machinery of indifference.

A text by Anaïs Nin, from the first volume of her *Diaries* (1966), covering the years 1931-1934: “We live life as we dream it, in one form or another. What strikes me is not this. It is the strength, the ferocity, the insistence with which most people give up their dreams, almost immediately. By the age of twenty, they already have an established, blocked, resigned profession, character, lifestyle. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. Fear makes it shrink. And I hate what is small, restricted, resigned. I rebel against greyness, pettiness, immobility. I want flow, danger, adventure, transformation, revolt.”

Controlled Fire My name, on your tongue, is a spark that won't go out. It's the taste of salt left by the waves as they recede, the moment before your breath changes rhythm and betrays everything. Imagine my back as a map your hands traverse with eyes closed, finding a new border each time. The texture of my skin is wet silk under warm rain, and every one of my shivers is a dance step I teach you without moving. When I read aloud, my voice is a dark velvet that wraps around your wrists, a warm current rising through your veins. The words I choose are smooth stones I warm in my palm before placing them, one by one, on your sternum. You count each syllable as an extra heartbeat, one less wait to endure. Between one stanza and the next, I leave a silence shaped like your desire. That is where you lose yourself, that is where you begin to burn. I don't need to touch you. I look at you, and where my gaze rests your skin remembers being light, before it was body, and begins to vibrate again with that ancient hunger. This is my power: to ignite fire with the wind. To blow on the ember of a glance, of a barely audible sigh, and see the flame blaze in your eyes, in your hands, in that precise point where thought yields and blood commands. You read me to the last line, and you follow me, atom by atom, all the way to ash.