The Upstairs Neighbor Learned to Listen to My Nights

There’s something I tell almost no one, and that is that I learned more about my own body in six months of lockdown than in all the years before that combined. I live alone, in a small apartment in an old building where the walls are thin as paper, and when the whole world stopped and it was no longer possible to see anyone, I had no choice but to turn my gaze inward. Toward myself.

I’m thirty-four, and I’ve always been one of those people who needs to unload often. That’s not an exaggeration: there are days when desire wakes me at dawn as if I were eighteen again, with my body tense and my head full of images that ask no permission. Night is my time. When the building falls silent and all you can hear is the fridge humming, something inside me switches on and there’s no way to turn it off until I’m done.

Before, I handled it quickly, almost as a formality. But confinement forced me to have patience with myself, to treat myself the way I would have liked another person to treat me. And I discovered, almost without meaning to, that pleasure in solitude doesn’t have to be a lesser version of anything. It can be an entire territory to explore.

***

My first companion in those months had been tucked away in a drawer for a long time, bought on a whim one afternoon and almost forgotten afterward. A thick, dark toy, a size that had intimidated me the first time. I pulled it out one random night, with an extra glass of wine and the house dark, and that night everything changed.

Like many people, I could work from home. I spent the mornings in front of the computer, answering emails and sitting through endless meetings. And it was right there, between one spreadsheet and the next, that the absurdest and best idea of the whole quarantine came to me. I discovered that if I positioned it properly on the chair and sat down slowly, I could keep working, crossed by a slow sensation that climbed up my back every time I moved a little.

I learned to hide it in meetings. To press my lips together when pleasure threatened to escape in a gasp, to move my hips just enough while someone talked about quarterly goals. If they knew, I thought, and that thought only turned me on more. I ended every morning exhausted and satisfied, with a smile my coworkers attributed, I suppose, to eagerness to start the day.

***

The shower became another of my favorite places. I had bought one of those suction-cup attachments, and I fixed it to the tiles at just the right height. Under the hot water pouring down my back, with steam fogging everything up, I let myself go in a different way, more slippery, more animal. The sound of the water covered my moans, or so I thought then.

And then there was the house, which had never been so clean. I discovered that household chores, besides being necessary, could be a game. While vacuuming or hanging up the laundry, I started inventing ways not to stop entirely. I improvised with what I had on hand, learned to regulate the height, the rhythm, to support my body weight in the exact way so that every movement counted. The trick was not to be in a hurry, to let the most boring task become an excuse to stretch desire out for hours, carrying it with me from one room to another like someone carrying a lit secret under their clothes.

I remember a Sunday afternoon, with the radio on and light slanting in through the window, when I caught myself ironing shirts and trembling at the same time, biting my lip so I wouldn’t cry out. I laughed to myself afterward, sprawled on the sofa. I had never imagined confinement would take me there.

***

But where I truly reveled was in my bed. The old bed, with the wooden headboard that banged against the wall, that thin wall separating my room from the rest of the building.

I had whole nights devoted only to myself. I would coat my body in oil and run my hands over myself slowly, stretching every sensation, denying myself the finish again and again until I could take no more. I learned that the secret wasn’t to rush, but to hold: to bring the body to the edge and pull back, and return, and pull back again, until pleasure becomes almost unbearable and then, only then, let yourself fall.

Face down, with the pillow folded underneath and both hands gripping the headboard, I set a rhythm that built on its own. First slow, almost shy. Then insistent. At the end, frantic, with the wood striking the wall in a constant knocking that filled the room, my legs taut, my whole body tightened like a rope about to snap. And when I came, I came with a muffled cry against the sheet that I didn’t even recognize as mine.

In those months I stopped being ashamed of my own pleasure. I stopped doing it in silence, in secret from no one, because there was no one. Or so I thought.

***

One morning, when I picked up the mail from under the door, I found among the flyers a paper folded into four. There was no return address. I opened it in the kitchen, coffee in hand, expecting a complaint from the residents’ association or a note from the doorman.

It was nothing of the sort.

“I live right above you,” the note said, in careful masculine handwriting. “I don’t want to bother you and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way. But these months have been very hard and, without meaning to, I’ve heard you more than one night. You have no idea how much good it’s done me. Thank you for reminding me that I still know how to want. A grateful neighbor.”

I stood there in the middle of the kitchen, rereading it, my face burning and my heart racing. My embarrassment lasted exactly as long as it took me to realize something else: I wasn’t bothered. On the contrary. The idea that someone, on the other side of the ceiling, had been listening to my nights, had been holding his breath at the same time as me, ran through my body like an electric current.

I knew who he was. I had crossed paths with him a couple of times on the stairs. A guy my age or a little younger, with an easy smile, who lived alone just like me. We had never spoken beyond a greeting. And suddenly we shared an enormous secret, held together by a plaster wall.

***

That night I couldn’t think of anything else. I went to bed early, but not to sleep. I lay there in the dark, listening. And for the first time I became aware of the sounds coming from above: a chair being dragged, footsteps, the creak of a bed.

I smiled in the dimness. He’s awake. Just like me.

I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe the certainty of having an audience, of not being alone in my solitude. I started slowly, as always, but this time with every intention in the world. I let the headboard speak for me, blow after blow against the wall, marking out a rhythm I knew he would recognize instantly. I let out the voice I normally smothered into the pillow.

And upstairs, the silence changed. It became a silence that listens, a charged, attentive silence. For an instant I thought I heard, between one knock and the next, a creak answering mine, like an echo arriving a second late. Two bodies separated by a ceiling, finding each other without touching.

I had never felt anything like it. It wasn’t only bodily pleasure; it was knowing myself desired, heard, accompanied across the only distance confinement had failed to close. I came with an intensity that left me empty and trembling, clutching the headboard, with a stranger’s name on the tip of my tongue even though I didn’t know it.

***

The next day I left him a note. It took me half an hour to write three lines. “I didn’t take it the wrong way. Quite the opposite. When this is over and it’s possible, I’d like to invite you for coffee. The walls know us far too well already.” I signed it with my apartment number and slid it under his door before I could change my mind.

The weeks passed. There were more nights and more shared silences, a mute conversation neither of us yet dared to put into words during the day. I learned to desire with the certainty of being heard, and I discovered that certainty multiplied every sensation until it became something else.

Confinement taught me to be with myself without fear, to turn pleasure in solitude into an art rather than a substitute. I learned that knowing your own body is not a consolation prize, but the foundation of anything worth sharing later with someone else. But it also gave me something I hadn’t expected: the fantasy of another person within reach of my voice, wanting at the same time as me, separated by only a few centimeters of wall. That impossible closeness, that play of echoes in the dark, marked me more than any real encounter I’d had before.

When we were finally able to open the doors to the world, the first door I knocked on was his. But that, my friends, is another story. And I swear to you it was worth every night of waiting.