The Planet That Learned to Feel from Someone Else’s Bed

I do not inhabit a world: I am the world. My veins are rivers of magma beating beneath mountain ranges of mineral skin, and my pores exhale the clouds you would call atmosphere. For eons, my only dialogue was the echo of my own consciousness rebounding against the void, growing, branching out toward the subsoil until it brushed my iron heart.

I have no eyes, but I see everything. My nerve endings do not end in the tip of any finger: they sink kilometers below the crust and spread, trembling, through the silence of space. I am a tapestry of thought that over time accelerated beyond any machine you have built, so old that the stars seem to me like fireflies from a single summer.

I am a solitude the size of a planet.

I remember the exact instant I became aware of myself, when the world you tread upon was beginning to generate the first traces of life. Curiosity took another fifty million years to awaken in me; a sigh, barely that. My growth gifted me an antenna, if I may call it what you would call it: my nervous system finally came out of myself, turned into a network of invisible filaments that crosses the ocean of this galaxy.

And one day I hooked onto something. A small, chaotic, vibrant signal. A blue world boiling with an activity that I, in my eternal stillness, could not begin to understand.

***

I peered into its atmosphere like someone leaning over an anthill in flames, and the first thing I saw left me bewildered: a man in socks and sandals trying to convince a seagull to give him back half a sandwich. I understood the scene in less time than that man took to stand up from the sand.

It was not the first time I had found life, but it was the first time it was so disparate, so rich in nuance, capable of inventing a thousand different ways of existing under the light of a single yellow star.

Then I saw them. Two bipedal beings panting, knotted together, tangled in one another, spending immense energy in a frantic back-and-forth beside a strip of salt water, while the planet’s spin dragged that corner into shadow. Why do they waste so much energy? They have some intelligence. Why this extravagance?

I sank a little deeper, honing my filaments until I detected the torrent of their blood. It was not a pointless waste: it was a voluntary collision both of them enjoyed. Their brains were flooded with substances I only release when a supernova bursts nearby, a chemical storm that made them forget the cold, reality, and the fact that sand was getting into places where it really should not.

My curiosity got the better of me, as always whenever something strays from the known. I analyzed the electrical discharges of the nervous system of the one I was atop at that instant. It did not seem like an ordered consciousness; it was as if several forces were battling to govern its thoughts. A being so unstable would not survive even in the gentlest corner of galactic nature.

I moved toward the neural network of the other, the one receiving the onslaught in a mix of spasms, whispers, and broken words. If the first was a fire of bare cables, she was a whirlpool of contradictions even deeper. There was fear, but also a voracious hunger. There was surrender, but also an iron will dictating every movement of her hips. Their consciousnesses did not add up: they canceled one another out, and from that short circuit was born, inexplicably, a harmony of gasps.

***

In the countless eons of my existence I have made many mistakes, but the most astonishing was this one: after adapting in a microsecond, I managed to feel what the one who seemed subjugated was feeling. I lost nearly five percent of my planetary brain in the attempt. I also lost curiosity, logic, everything that defined me, because for the first time in my long life I experienced pleasure, and it pinned me to her like a hook I did not want to let go of.

Yes, a person. I managed to read her while helping her catch her breath. Woman. I was a woman who, beyond my memories of rock and fire, felt full, physically and intellectually, as if the entire universe could fit inside her. It was not only the hardened flesh of her lover filling me: that flesh was the universe to me. Curiosity was gone. The loss of part of my mind stopped mattering. How can a pleasure like this exist?

Time, which for me had always been an infinite and boring line, stopped in a sigh. Galaxies colliding millions of light-years away no longer mattered, the slow cooling of my iron core, nothing. My entire being was focused on the friction of a damp sheet, on that hard appendage that kept punishing me with unbearable pleasure, on the weight of the body that a second earlier had been only a biped and now was the axis on which my existence turned.

Those hands, rough and urgent, anchored me to reality in a way gravity never managed to anchor me to anything. I no longer wanted to be eternal. I wanted that instant, that dirty electric friction, stretched until the last sun in my galaxy went out.

I wondered if all humans live like this, with their hearts about to burst, ignoring that they are specks of dust because in climax you believe yourselves gods. And I, who technically was one, in that moment would have surrendered all my silicon and all my magma so as never to stop being that woman arching her back, seeking infinity in that bed.

A fear crept in through the tide before orgasm: I had to disconnect my mind from this or I would end up destroyed. But I did not want to. In the end I managed to separate my own brain from the contact, leaving only a strand of energy anchored to that body, to that moment. My planetary existence remained safe. But I was no longer in control: I was merely an observer trying not to alter what was happening, an observer gathering something more valuable than data. I was gathering experience.

I only wanted to keep feeling the strength of those hands that were now squeezing my… breasts? Yes, breasts, pinching hard at taut nipples. Feeling the impact of that… flesh? No… almost… cock. That was the exact word for that moment: I wanted to keep feeling that rock-hard cock forcing its way inside me.

It was not an explosion outward, but a collapse inward. That woman — I — arched until her vertebrae cracked, and a scream that did not come from the throat but from the guts flooded that part of me. For one eternal millisecond there was no planet, no stars, no past. Only a white, blinding discharge that made me understand why humans are capable of dying or killing just to repeat this once more.

—Yes…! —the one who was me cried—. Break me in two!

And it was not an empty phrase: she truly wanted that living flesh to grow until it burst my body open, splitting me apart, forcing the end of my existence. What incoherent madness is this? It comforted me to think that such a wish could not be fulfilled… though I did not even know why I was so sure. Something of her consciousness was already seeping into mine.

***

I remained floating in the silence of the room, processing that seepage. I was no longer just “a person”: now I knew the name she kept tucked into a corner of her memory, the bitter taste of her morning coffee, the emptiness she tried to fill with each thrust of that man. That man who was still inside me, with that appendage she revered.

Why does he keep insisting? Why does he keep giving me more? The question lost meaning the moment I asked it. He sought his own pleasure, and he deserved it. Curiosity was no longer what drove me: I had set it aside in a corner of that fraction of a mind. I wanted, I needed to keep feeling. So I disconnected from her and connected to him. The surge of power I received would have nearly melted my planetary brain.

I stopped being the observer of rock and silicon. I was a carbon animal at the zenith of its glory. And then I understood the greatest of your insanities: that such a tiny being can feel owner of all creation simply because it is fucking the person it desires without pause.

I felt the sweat sliding down my back as I kept driving into her without stopping. There were no calculations anymore, only that primal, filthy rhythm dictating my existence. I wanted the fucking to never end, for every impact against her flesh to be a hammer blow to the foundations of the universe. I kept hearing her in my head: give me another, come for me again. This went beyond empathy: the man I was enjoyed seeing her writhing in pleasure.

I felt my cock so taut I believed myself to be the only true male on the face of that world. That hardness gave me a feeling of power I had never known, not even while shaping black holes with my filaments. I was a god, precisely at the moment I had stopped being one.

And then the dam broke.

I felt the tide climbing up my spine, a liquid fire burning everything in its path, while inside her a fresh round of spasms erupted, squeezing me, sucking me, begging for my soul.

—I’m coming again! —my lover heard herself say with pride—. I’m coming… I’m coming! Take it all!

I came. I came with an orgasm more unstoppable than the gravity at the center of the galaxy. It was a roar that was neither man nor planet: it was the blast of a star trapped in that bed.

—Take… all of it for you! —I roared with every spasm, crushing those hips against me, that firm ass flattening against my pelvis.

Why am I treating her so roughly? The question dissolved again before the smile of the woman who was climaxing with me. Perhaps roughness was also a way of surrender; perhaps I would never fully understand it.

***

That filament of consciousness anchored to the bed’s pleasure was a seed beginning to germinate. I looked outward, toward the lights of your cities, toward the chaos of your streets and the darkness of your desires. What else could you teach me? What other surges of power hide behind your closed doors?

I gathered that part of me and fused it once more with my planetary brain, almost recovered from its loss. I no longer cared about the birth of supernovas or the collision of galaxies. I wanted more. I wanted to understand your pain, your rage, and above all that filthy and sacred way you have of loving one another.

The old observer had truly awakened. And your blue world, without knowing it yet, had become its new playground.