Passages

Finally in Bali, Zoe had followed the rushed decision of her heart, and she did not regret it.

She had already done what instinct had told her to pursue there first. Now she wondered what one should do next upon arriving on a paradise island. Visiting a hypnotherapist seemed exciting enough. Perhaps hypnosis would help her embark on another journey, this time into herself.

The room was flooded with the soft green light of the tropical afternoon. Through the open windows, Zoe could see palms leaning into the heat, their enormous leaves moving slowly above the garden. The air smelled faintly of incense and something sweeter she could not identify.

Her therapist was a woman with dreadlocks and several piercings in her nose, dressed in loose clothes of such extravagant colours that she looked a little like a parrot.

Oh my God, this is going to be funny, Zoe thought. This lady looks more unglued from reality than I am. But perhaps this is precisely what hypnosis is about.

The session began with the usual onboarding questions, until one of them seemed to pierce the airspace between them.

‘What is the most precious thing in your life?’

Zoe took a few seconds to think. Then she answered with certainty.

‘My body.’

The therapist regarded her with visible surprise. ‘Why your body? People usually speak about health, happiness, family, success. I don’t think anyone has ever given me that answer.’

‘That surprises me,’ Zoe said. ‘I would have thought it was rather obvious.’

‘Obvious?’ The therapist tilted her head. ‘Most people who sit in that chair tell me their body is the thing that lets them down.’

‘Mine too, sometimes,’ Zoe admitted. ‘But my body is also the source of pleasure.’ She thought for a moment. ‘When someone I desire touches me, the body becomes a vessel capable of downloading sexual pleasure from some cosmic source and pouring ecstasy all over my being. And that capacity never leaves me, wherever I am and whatever is happening in my life. I find that sacred.’

The therapist watched her with growing curiosity.

‘Everything else in life is flowing,’ Zoe continued. ‘Things enter and leave us. Money. People. Health. Success. Nothing really stays. Until we die, the body is perhaps the only thing we actually have.’

‘You put people in that list,’ the therapist said. ‘Between money and health.’

Zoe hesitated, only for a moment.

‘People leave too.’

The therapist wrote something down and said nothing.

‘But it isn’t only that,’ Zoe went on, a little faster. ‘I think the body stands somewhere at the very core of what it means to have a human experience on this Earth – or in this realm, if we want to make it sound less ordinary.’

The therapist smiled. ‘Less ordinary?’

‘You know the idea that souls come to Earth to have a human experience?’

She had wanted to discover the man who might become her lover. Instead, without either of them deciding it, the atmosphere was beginning to resemble protection, concern, seriousness.

She wondered whether those things necessarily excluded eroticism. Surely they didn’t. Protection could be profoundly erotic. Care could be erotic. Even vulnerability could be.

But something about the timing felt wrong.

Hugo had entered a room inside her that she hadn’t opened yet.

Still, he persuaded her to see him again.

And again, once they were together, they had a genuinely good time. Their conversation flowed. They laughed. The atmosphere softened.

For a while Leah thought perhaps she had simply been overthinking everything.

Then Hugo became serious.

He told her that he felt a connection between them and believed it was mutual. He understood that she was going through a difficult period, he said, and he didn’t want to pressure her.

But perhaps they should start something and see where it took them.

‘I’m not pushing,’ he assured her.

Leah looked at him.

There was something peculiar about being told that you weren’t being pushed while simultaneously feeling yourself being pushed.

She didn’t want to turn a beautiful evening into an unpleasant memory. Nor did she feel the need to reject something she hadn’t even understood yet.

So she nodded, and told him that after the year she had had, she might need some time.

She left the matter unresolved.

But on the way home, something bothered her.

Why did they need a plan already?

They had spent only a few hours of their lives together. She hadn’t even discovered yet whether Hugo could make her want him, and somehow they were already discussing the architecture of a relationship.

Where was the flirting?

Where were those tiny gestures and glances through which two people slowly discover what they awaken in each other?

Where was the art?

Leah stared through the window.

What had happened to courtship?

The world was drowning in information. Everywhere she looked, somebody was teaching somebody else how to trade, how to become an influencer, how to optimise a morning routine.

But who was teaching anyone how to awaken desire?

Not how to ‘make someone fall in love’. Even that sounded too grand, too outcome- oriented.

Simply how to awaken erotic energy in another human being.

How to approach.

How to notice.

How to leave something unfinished.

Thinking back to the expensive restaurant she had just left – an objectively perfect date that had somehow felt increasingly clumsy – Leah had the absurd thought that someone should address the subject before future generations forgot the art altogether.

This is where erotic co-creation requires something more subtle than self-expression. It requires attention to the truth of both people.

Neither person should have to perform a response in order to preserve the fantasy of the other.

And perhaps this is one of the simplest practical consequences of authenticity: lovers who can tell each other the truth have the possibility of learning each other.

With time, that understanding can become extraordinarily precise. We begin to recognise not only what another person likes, but how they respond, when to continue and when to change direction. Pleasure becomes less dependent on guessing because two people have gradually developed a language of their own.

Authenticity therefore does more than preserve truth within the erotic field.

It allows the field to evolve.

And if erotic co-creation is a way of meeting beyond two separate experiences, truth is not an obstacle to pleasure.

It is one of the ways deeper pleasure becomes possible.

Composition gives erotic art form. Authenticity gives it truth. Resonance gives it life.

And yet authenticity does not take away from imagination.

Think of the characters Zoe and Loïc so playfully created between them – Zoe on a train, Zoe becoming a nurse. They were no more pretending than children playing cowboys.

We may play such characters because, for a moment, the experience genuinely attracts us. The fiction is invented. The desire to experience it is not.

Perhaps part of the art of erotic co-creation lies precisely here: in expressing a character authentically.

The character may be staged. The situation may be invented. We may become completely absorbed in a role that bears little resemblance to who we are in ordinary life. And still, what it awakens in us can be true.

Our pleasure can be true. The way we respond to another person can be true. And through the fiction, two consciousnesses can still genuinely meet.

The character does not have to be real for the experience to be real.

The truth can reveal itself through play.