In the Steam Room

We are disappearing. It’s like being loved. We are accepting, we are all accepted. No one is ugly, no one unloved. Your mouth is not your own, your cock not your own, your touch not yours. My cock is yours. Your tongue is my tongue. No touch is refused. There is nothing you cannot touch. We are all beautiful. All folds of flesh are beautiful, all hair is beautiful, all baldness, every breath is beautiful, no matter what preceded this moment, alcohol, salt and vinegar, a mint, burgers, all welcome. The towel around his waist is beautiful, his willingness to be probed is beautiful. We drape our towels around our shoulders to reveal our bodies. I am beautiful, beyond beauty. There is no judgement. We are so close we can barely see each other’s faces. We are reduced… we are elevated to touch and skin and breath and air. The heat melts us into each other, the steam softness our vision. The world needs softening. So closely pressed together, we cannot turn to see where the hand is coming from, the hand on our chest, our face, our stomach, our cock. You sucking on my nipple, is that your hand on my balls?

Make this last. Make this the face of eternity. Make this everything. This is love. This is welcoming. This is belonging. The world is in need of this, to be so close that there is no room to cause harm, no will to cause harm.

At some point one of us leaves, or someone joins who is unanimously unwanted. We all have our limits, we all have a point from which judgement enters. What was simple is no longer simple, and besides, we’ve booked a massage with the sauna’s masseur, or we’re going to be late for dinner if we don’t go now, or one of us remembers the world outside, the friend who is ill, the family beckoning, the wife, the children, we begin to remember. We begin to let slip that this is not the world, this is not everything.

Who will tell the story of this? Who will let the world know that there are moments like these in which men disappear into each other. The Pole with brown hair down to his shoulders, the Nigerian with raised nipples, the stocky Kurd, the shy Turk, the Welshman who later tells us he lives in Bordeaux. Who will recount this incident? Who will be witness to those of us who took part in this brief moment in time, this event that has coalesced, then dispersed. How rare. How rare.

We all know someone who has fought, someone who has been killed, someone who is fighting to stay alive. We have all been judged and we have all condemned. And yet, and yet, we are still here in the steam room, we are still relinquishing awareness, we are still letting go, allowing the heat to melt us, touch to melt us, mouths to melt us, as we are fed, sustaining each other, before we go back out into the world, better.