Conversation erotics

bring your brain for this one

I know nobody wants another social commentary on how we don’t know how to hold conversations anymore, how it’s hard to talk to people without getting distracted, never really connecting. Shit, some of us may also never had any real conversations! I’m talking about those conversations that are followed by a silence that sits heavy and warm in your chest, that one where you replay the sentences in your mouth to really taste the sweetness of it again. You know them, the ones you continue alone in the showers. Or maybe you don’t and if that’s the case, i’m not here to shame you or give you the ways of getting to it.

I’m not going to tell you it’s the phones, you already know about the phones. What I want to talk about is what happens when two people actually show up with their whole complicated machinery that is their brains - and what that does to a room, to an afteroon, to the weeks that come after. I want to talk about brain sex, and why we’ve stopped doing it.

I think about conversation the way I think about good sex. Don’t misunderstand me, the talk is almost never sexual, they just have the same mechanics. You rarely plan it, maybe you can arrange the setting, pick the time say let’s talk but the thing itself, the real deal, arrives on its own terms or it doesn’t arrive at all. When it does though, you feel it immediately, the air becomes a bit thicker, the other person leans in just slightly and you can feel it in the way your own thoughts start arriving faster than usual, sharper and your brain spazzing because its finally getting awoken.

These conversations hold you hostage. Your whole self is suddenly on the table because the other person asked the right question in the right way and something in you just opened. They are moving around inside your thinking, testing the walls, finding the rooms you forgot you had. And you’re doing the same to them, you’re watching their mouth move and trying to trace the smell of the idea before it becomes a word. You’re looking, no, investigating how their mind works, where it hesitates, where they’re lying without meaning it. Both of you are moving around each others most vulnerable spaces, creating something new.

That’s what I mean when I say erotic, I mean it in the oldest sense of the word; eros, desire, the pull toward something outside yourself that makes you more yourself. A conversation is an act of desire, you want the other persons mind, their ideas, and you want to be wanted back in the same way.

It doesn't have to be anything grand. I hate how people try to intellectualize everything, box anything into an unattainable niche that only the privileged can access. Oh no, people have been brain fucking for a while, it is simple, sometimes it’s quick other times a bit longer but it gives you the same high. I’ve had my soul rearranged in a conversation about fruit.

Mangoes specifically. It started about why I loved them, was it the different hues that made them appetizing, the sweetness that has a hint of something almost salty underneath, the neighbors tree I used to steal from as a kid, the feeling of juice running down my arm in a way that felt like getting away with something, my sticky fingers after such a meal. By the time I was done, I wasn’t talking about mangoes no more. I was talking about home, about hunger, about what it means to want something badly enough to take it. The mango was just a small/simple opening to the real conversation.

Good conversations are curious, it’s not an interview. You are not debating to be right. It’s two people building something that didn’t exist before they started talking in real time, something that won’t survive the night but will leave a mark on both of them. It’s when you forget to breathe because the other perosn just said the thing you’ve been feeling so deeply but couldn’t explain, it’s when you ask a question and watch the thought form behind their eyes before it reaches their mouths. It’s the specific pleasure of being understood. Good conversations are the ones that leave you both questioning yourselves, it leaves you with your brains stretching a bit more trying to make space for the other half.

After a good one, I usually feel just a little bit naked. A little embarrassed by my own openness, a little emotional in the sense that it’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there. You can’t quite look at the person directly for a moment because you know they’ve seen something real and they know it too, and you’re just both sitting with that. Good conversation will leave you with a little bit more love, not necessarly romantic, more like you acknowledge what happened and are grateful for it. I have to appreciate the fact that they’ve allowed me in there, that we both know what we just did and frankly, we’re both happy right now so does it even matter?

Good conversation is sexy because it’s endearing - to be seen, to look back, to talk, think with someone else, creating you guys’ own space for just a few moments. It’s like when you watch a movie or read a book, it’s a sensation that is often hard to explain.. Remember the moment where you were not focused on yourself only but on the other perosn entirely, when you couldn’t wait for your thoughts to share a bed, coexist and mingle together to create something, when your whole body was alive because you were excited about this.

This is what we are not doing anymore, and it ain’t because we’ve become “stupid” or “shallow” or even “lost”, we are none of those things, or we are all of them, same as always but its because we have stopped bringing ourselves to the table. We show up with our opinions and takes, our need to be right, interesting or impressive and leave our brains at home. See the thing about brain sex is that it requires you to be an active participant. You cannot receive it passively, you will never feel it well enough. You have to bring your whole self, your actual thoughts the ones that are still half-formed and strange. You have to be willing to be wrong in front of someone, you have to be willing to be bare and to be changed.

I’ve had a few of those this year, they reminded me what I’m capable of thinking, feeling, how much I actually have to say when someone makes me feel seen enough to say it. I think about those conversations before I sleep. I wish I could have them again, just once more - to feel that sense of two people making something together that neither of them could have made alone. You can’t force it, trying to force it would be kind of sad, pouring your energy into nothing leaving you empty. It has to be mutual, both of you all the way in.

When it happens - and it will happen, it does happen, even now, even still - you’ll know. Your whole soul will know, you’ll just be there talking about mangoes or god or nothing in particular and somewhere in the middle of a sentence you’ll realize you’ve been holding your breath, and you’ll exhale and it will feel like the best thing that’s happened to you in months.

Because it probably will be.