While It Lasts, Let It Be Intense...

I've been thinking a lot about the way I experience things.

About how I surrender, how I feel, how I allow experiences and people to move through me.

I'm an intense woman. The kind who shows up with her whole body, her whole heart, her whole being. I don't know how to keep one foot in and one foot out. I don't know how to ration desire, pretend indifference or play that carefully calculated game of not caring too much.

I like to feel. I like skin, chemistry, complicity, conversations that stretch long into the night, glances that say things words don't need to. I like the scent of someone lingering in my sheets, the warmth of another body next to mine, the intimacy that unfolds when two people stop rushing. I love everything that happens before, during and after. The anticipation, the surrender, the memories that linger in the body.

I don't know how to do things halfway. And perhaps I no longer want to learn.

For a long time, I confused intensity with surrendering myself to someone else. As though the depth of what I felt depended on someone's ability to reciprocate, stay or give as much in return. Today, I'm beginning to understand that there is a world of difference between feeling deeply and making someone else responsible for what I feel.

It's like an orgasm. The other person isn't responsible for giving me one. They can awaken desire, tease me, touch me in all the right places, learn my body and discover my secrets. But I am the one who has to let go. I am the one who has to release control, stop thinking, stop anticipating, stop trying to orchestrate the moment. I am the one who has to allow myself to get there.

The pleasure is mine. The surrender is mine, too.

And perhaps that's what I'm learning about intimacy and about life: I can become deeply involved without becoming attached. I can desire without needing to possess. I can surrender to the moment without losing my way back to myself.

I don't get attached. I get involved, deeply, but I don't attach myself.

I know that every day is a choice. That people meet, discover each other, touch, transform one another and sometimes go their separate ways. I know that nothing is guaranteed. There are no invisible contracts, no unspoken promises, no guarantees that anyone will stay. And strangely enough, that awareness no longer fills me with anxiety.

I don't need to know where something is going. I don't need to turn every encounter into the possibility of a future. I don't need to hold on to something to feel that it was mine.

It doesn't mean feeling less. Perhaps it means finally knowing how to feel without fear.

I don't want to make myself smaller, more restrained or less passionate simply because the world seems to prefer emotionally economical people. I don't want to learn how to pretend I don't care when I do, or hide my desire just to appear unbothered.

I want to remain this woman who feels with her entire being. Who laughs out loud, desires, allows herself to be surprised, enjoys talking until dawn and falling asleep with another body beside hers. A woman who still believes in the electricity of a glance, the beauty of a lingering kiss and the dizzying thrill of discovering someone.

But I want to do it freely.

Free from the need to know what comes next. Free from the anxiety of losing something. Free from the temptation to turn the present into a promise of the future.

Because perhaps true freedom isn't about not feeling. Perhaps it's about being able to feel everything without ever ceasing to belong to ourselves.

And if tomorrow our paths diverge, so be it. I won't diminish what happened simply because it didn't last. Nor will I call an experience a mistake just because it made me feel alive for a while.

Some things don't need to last forever to be extraordinary.

While it lasts, let it be intense. Let it have flavour, flesh, soul and memory.

As Vinicius de Moraes wrote, let it not be eternal, since it is a flame, but let it be infinite while it lasts.