Love at first sense.

There is much talk about the cliché of love at first sight.

It is not surprising that our eyes, in charge of processing in milliseconds what is presented to them, are the ones that issue the first judgment on the potential security, compatibility, complicity, and well-being that another person can offer us. It is not a coincidence either: this split-second judgment is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, of trial and error by ancestors who survived to leave imprinted in our brains -and forged in fire- what "should be". However, this sense suffers, possibly more than any other, from flaws: Without going any further, the Thatcher illusion shows us that the world of visual perception can be completely fooled, and it snatches away in a simple turn of 180° what we took for granted.

Not only that: The guarantee of love at first sight is not something that everyone who possesses it can enjoy. Here I am stopping at a fairly large subgroup, although often unaware of their disability: those who suffer from prosopagnosia or face blindness. How can we trust a sense that is already fragile, if every day when we look in the mirror it shows us a completely new figure? How can we be able to discover others, to take solace in a familiar look, if our own does not offer us the warmth of recognizing ourselves?

Having established then the little reliability offered by the so-called "love at first sight", I would like us to divert our gaze (what an irony, isn't it?) to other senses; senses that with a powerful (and oxymoronic) subtlety are capable of enveloping us in emotions to which the body, in its profound totality, reacts.

Imagine, for example, dancing with closed eyes, one by one, to a soft melody.

Imagine that through a warm rhythm, you discover how your blood begins to pulse in unison with another pulse and another body and that, to the gentle beat of the rhythmic sound, your heart throbs inside you and within another chest. The music then becomes white noise and the beats in unison are the only thing that marks the rhythm in the silence of that incipient intimacy.

The breathing then begins its path. Dainty at first, through a chest that expands and rests like waves in a deserted bay, the touch makes its way into a path that first partially sensitizes and then, as if it was a rising night storm, reshapes through each warm, cold, sweaty, soft and hard contact. The sensitivity is such that a simple cheek-to-cheek encounter shakes, wave by wave, the deepest part of the lower back; and fragile fingers around the neck are capable of evoking a deep, exquisite and painful current of desire. The breathing, amid the storm, remains as a solitary beacon to keep us awake and conscious while every pore is intoxicated and drowned in the stimulus of feeling.

Each aroma has its own moment of prominence: the sweet presence of a perfume that like a first breeze announces the imminent arrival of the storm; the velvety gust of the aroma on the skin; the almost accidental stimulus of warm hair, and the sensation of lost swaying as we delve into the subtlety of a breath running through the ear, like a blessed promise to the eternal return to the skin that shudders and subsides again.

On rare occasions, the sensitive accumulation converges in the miracle of a kiss. Taste then becomes the pool where the flow of emotions and other senses strand, and all at the same time become one: A fresh taste of mint that evokes the aroma of a field in summer; a hint of crystalline white wine, like glasses when toasting; a subtle taste of coffee that, as a central note, makes the skin crawl from the lips to the heart; and a dreamy heterochromia that opens, discovers, feels and surrenders to the gift of intimacy.

In the face of the intense sensorial immensity offered by the storm of everything, and culminated by two glances that discover each other for the first time after having seen each other a thousand times before... isn't it not only possible but imminent for one to feel love, even if it is for a moment? What form or remedy can Love have when the last sense that awakens it is sight? Isn't time to re•claim the phrase "love at first sight," since in reality sight only offers a fleeting moment that pales in comparison to the presence of a seductive sensory consistency?

Perhaps Love, like all human feelings, prefers to obey constant and holistic patterns. 

Perhaps that is why I am so defiantly and categorically opposed to the idea that the most celebrated pillar is also the most fragile of all...

And that is definitely why I prefer to call it "Love at first sense."

Dancetasy

My face rests on your chest while I hear the beats of the music and imagine a common pulse with the beats of your heart. I feel the relaxation that involves us, in the middle of the silence and the darkness, while your chin lies on my head. Softly, with the tips of your fingers, you caress my shoulders, go down my arms, and hold my wrists gently before landing on the back of my hand. Once there, you embrace my waist while my hands climb their way to your shoulders, and caress the back of your neck. 

You whisper "What is your name?".  I chuckle. "I told you already", and look into your eyes to see if you are playing games or simply teasing. "And yours?", you look me in the eye, as if you were loss for words; "I don't know anymore". "Me neither", I reply.

I rest my face on your chest again; this time, your hands around my waist and my hands around your neck give us a tense proximity. Your hands go slightly down and this motion joins our hips together and to the rhythm. The cadence of the music playing in the background feels like a perfect foreplay for what is to come. I feel how your breathing counteracts the mildness of the tempo. 

Everything feels blurry around me, and the only certainty relies in the texture of your chest and the smell of your skin. My hands navigate slowly from your neck to your shoulders, from your shoulders to your blades, from your blades to your waist. The pressure of our movement increases, as well as our breathing. 

The music is gone, I don't know since when, and it doesn't matter. 

We keep moving to an imaginary melody played by our bodies, by our breathing, by our caressing. Slowly, but surely, the built-up tension subsides and opens a path for a deep, tender hug. 

"Sina?" I smile. "Sure". "Would you like to come to my place for a cup of coffee?". I smile again. The clumsy nervousness in your voice is enough for me to say yes without a doubt. We walk together while talking about everything that comes to our minds, as if we were trying to catch up on who we are, before bestowing our naked fragility on each other.

The night was beyond anything imaginable. The unbearable passion of a first time danced as well with the calmed comfort of a body kissed a thousand times. 

I wake up next to you and watch you sleep for a bit before deciding to get up. You open your eyes and look at me for a second, as if you were first computing my presence around you, and then you smile,

"Hi", you say.

I look at you with the deepest love, and I see how much this scares you. I restrain my facial expression and go along. "Good morning. I'll make breakfast".

"You don't have to", you reply.

"Of course I do. Stay in bed, we still have two hours before the kids come with their spouses and we have our family trip".

I can't bear another moment of your confusion. I clean my tears before I go downstairs. In 30 minutes, you will have forgotten again.

...But until your body forgets how to move too, we will still have our evening dances.