Eye Gazing

It was late at night at an intimate festival around the charming hour of 3 am, when the night air began to bite and the ambient drug energy was beginning to calm. I was wandering with a discontent purposelessness, eventually meandering into some friends that I could follow instead. Together we went up to the top of a hill that perched between the two valleys full of campsites. 

On the top of that hill was a lounge with a plush cuddle space and beautiful laser cut piano that glowed from the inside softly purple and orange and red as people played. It was refreshing, the air cold but atmosphere warm.

I was frustrated. I wanted to vent to someone and I didn’t know how to ask. Looking around at the pile of bodies, I spotted a person I didn’t know next to some people I did know. An attractive person that had a kind look to him in a way that’s hard to pin down. I thought I knew his name, maybe. 

I sat down next to him and expressed my discontent at my night. There was so little depth in my interactions! I was an observer, unable to communicate and locked out of my own mind. When I shared that, he told me that he recognized the sadness in my eyes.

He was right, I was feeling sadness. I didn’t realize. I thanked him.

We took each other’s warm hands and sat close, bracing ourselves in the night air to watch a pianist beneath a psychedelic moon as he sang out under the stippling of stars. Mixed up with our feet were a dozen cuddling, intertwined bodies that relaxed with us. He began to work on my muscles around my shoulders and neck, gently pressing them down and helping them relax. After a few minutes of this intense and unexpected care, I began to cry a little, quietly. 

We looked at each other, tears in my eyes, relaxing our faces and gazing. Freedom from social performance. Our pupils contracted and dilated with our breaths and how we held our attention. I saw in his eyes beautiful pain. I saw a deep, calm sadness and I knew then that I loved him. 

We continued like this for several hours. Every time we shifted positions to straighten our backs or give an arm a rest, one of us extended a hand again. Every time, we reconnected, slowly building up a trust without words that we both wanted this. Needed this, even. Not a moment was boring. To put it dramatically, it felt as if I had been waiting for this my entire life. 

After hours of the continued cycle of syncing our bodies with one another and staring into each other’s eyes, I broke the sacred silence to tell him I was distractingly cold. Using words was vulnerable. I was scared I was breaking a beautiful thing.

We walked down the hill in close synchrony of steps as the sky lightened to a dim blue, giggling a little as we walked on a path one foot on each side of the stepping stone. I was shivering a lot at this point, which frustrated me. This made me want to go faster than our careful and slow lockstep, making our syncing more dissonant for much of the walk to the tea house. 

We separated for a minute to use the restroom, a surprisingly precarious thing. Very slow trust building. We then returned to our happy equilibrium, cuddling, face touching and eyes becoming less and less open in the early morning comfort of the teahouse. Warmer. The beauty of his eyes was still there, intense.  

We fell asleep like that, curled together in a bath of warm light and the sounds of soft conversations. 

When I woke up in the morning, he was no longer there, probably having left quietly to kindly avoid waking me. I felt the pained and sad confusion and insecurity of not knowing if he was returning or not. I lay there awake for a while, wondering. In some ways, what happened was instant codependence. An addictive closeness with absolute focus as we moved slowly and taking one step at a time, building security piece by piece. 

He didn’t come back after a while, so I swallowed my insecurity and shuffled off to my tent to sleep more. 

The next day it was hard to not think about what had happened. What was that, even? Who is this person? We hardly exchanged words and I had felt so much intense compassion and affection. What was that about? Would getting to know him more somehow stain that experience or allow another beautiful thing to happen? 

I don’t know. 

This is the second-most pleasurable thing I’ve ever experienced.

In the aftermath, something seems to have shifted. I have less anxiety about noticing the people around me. I think I was averse to eye contact before, so subconsciously that I didn’t notice. When I look around at a room full of strangers I see now real humans that I could connect with if I approached with openness and a smile. Humans that want connection just like I do.