It was your silence. Your deadly silence that made sex with you entrancing. And it was also your silence that made me feel as if with each one of our encounters, I was being offered a clean slate. A new page to write on. A new page to tear apart. New bedsheets to cover with sin. New walls to tear down with my loud moaning.

We were in the twenty first century. Yet it felt as though we were in 1700 BC and had just invented the alphabet. A new way of conversing without uttering a single word. 

My impatient sex grinding on your knee like a vagabond begging: “Feed me. Feed me.”

The symphony of silence always started like this:

I would sit next to you on the couch and lay my drowsy head on your beating heart as if with each heartbeat, I was repeatedly whispering, “I have missed you. I have missed you.” You would run your fingers through my hair, caressing my back as if you were reassuring me, “This heart, whatever remains of it, is beating only for you.” 

My famished lips would trace the line of your neck with hunger and desperation. Your rapid breathing echoing: “More. More.” My trembling fingers would reach the edge of your shirt to unfasten your stubborn belt. My impatient sex grinding on your knee like a vagabond begging: “Feed me. Feed me.” And your generous hands patiently helping me liberate your penis and unwrap the gift I had magically crafted for myself.

Take it if it brings you joy.

Then your gentle lips would smile at me, amusedly: 

“Take it. 

Take it if it brings you joy.”

It was your irresistible silence that made your penis desirable. It was your silence that made me gaze at it as if it were a cold peach in the middle of a scorching summer day. As if it were indeed an ice-cream cone or a shooting star in the middle of an empty sky. It was your silence, the silence of generous men that do not desire anything, that made me kneel down in front of it as if I were about to pray in front of an altar. It was your innocent eyes watching over me that made me take it into my magnificent mouth and circle my tongue around it as if I were circling the glorious moon with my tongue. 

It was also your heavy breathing as if you were a dying animal in torment that made me always pause. And your urgent desperate hand on my neck that always asked the same inevitable question: 

“Do you want me inside of you?”

I would smile at you and carefully lock your hand around my neck. It was my way of responding: “No. Not tonight.” Then I would desperately push your penis to the back of my mouth as if I was discovering a new way to breathe without breathing, a new way to silently howl:

“I’m dying to taste your liquid soul tonight.”

Malak el Halabi

Poet Warrior. Autocorrect is my only nemesis.