This is not a love story.
It’s a story that takes places at three o’clock in the afternoon in the city’s imperfect silence, where cars speed by and voices call out from the street; all these disparate sounds coming through the open windows as we crash against each other like waves smacking against the shore.
This is no happy ending, nothing you’d see on the silver screen.
This is a story of affection, a story of a desire that burns while across the street the old man watches afternoon television on the sofa, and the upstairs neighbor listens to the radio too loudly as we hear his footsteps over our heads. This world goes by calmly, while we tear off every single shred of our very beings in a narrow bed, in a narrow world, too small to contain all this electricity running between us that blacks out the entire universe.
This is a story of two bodies, craving each other to the point of wanting to become one; it’s the story of sweaty skin, screams suffocated in the cushion’s soft fabric, nails sliding longingly along limbs. Open mouths, avid stares, hands grasping the flesh so hard they could tear it off and leave the body bare; you see through infinity and nothing else matters. We desire each other like there’s no tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow; this story only has the one chapter, and it will end as suddenly and unapologetically as it has begun; it’s a hurricane that lasts just long enough to destroy us, and it will leave nothing behind. We won’t promise each other tomorrows, or say other words that won’t mean a thing but will make us feel safe; like blankets on a cold winter’s day. The warm water will wash away the last traces of if all, we’ll clean our bodies of each other, and life will kickstart again. Easily—no harm is done, because this is not a love story.
It’s the story of a fire that sparked at three in the afternoon, spreading and dying in your room without anyone else but us noticing anything at all.
written by Ludovica De Gaudenzi
Photography by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash
