The onion’s holy layer
We are all onions. We all have layers. Different levels of understanding that reveal themselves as we get to know someone. Peeling these layers is my favorite game. Observing, dissecting, understanding. Unraveling the secrets of one another, sitting there in silence. Learning.
It’s just that some people have more layers than others, thicker, or almost nothing at all, like empty shells. The simplest of minds, the most insipid, have layers so thin that they are translucent.
She, she had a number of layers never i’ve never seen before. I peeled one after another, but it seemed like a could never reach the end.
I thought that, once the nudity was explored, intimacy broken, the layers would become thinner, rarer, easier to remove. But it was as if the more I progressed, the more her armor turned into iron, crystal, rock. She was impenetrable, unreadable. I wondered if she was even real.
Everything was confusion and paradox. She first caught my eye with hers, icy, tough, incisive. I thought, someone with such disdain must hide many vulnerabilities. By a reflexion that seemed logical to me, I thought that if the first layer was so hard, the rest must be nothing but sweetness and fragility. Like a chocolate candy with a marshmallow heart.
What a surprise then, to see that under the chocolate hid a multitude of other flavors, which had nothing to do with each other, which harmonized and clashed depending on the days and her whims.
Cought in the adventure, I grabbed my machete to explore her jungle, this new field filled with games.
Under the layer of control, there was a lost child.
Under the layer of the lost child, there was a dominatrix.
Under the layer of the dominatrix, there was a philosopher.
Under the layer of the philosopher, there was a gentle madness. This one was charming.
Under the layer of madness, there was a Cartesian mind of relentless logic. Every time I thought I understood her, she slipped away. And the more she slipped away, the more I fell in love.
And the more I fell in love, the less she showed. It was unfathomable.
Perhaps behind these layers, was something even more brilliant, making everything I had already seen seem very superficial. It was as if, knowing this, she made a conscious effort to keep this soulful richness, these invaluable treasures, away from my eyes.
Inside her, she nourished such a vast universe that she could create her own macrocosm without anyone’s help. She was at the center of a world unknown to me, whose language sang only for her ears, and that no profane could ever comprehend. My soul as an explorer turned into an anthropologist, hypnotized, obsessed with the idea of understanding the language that was uniquely hers. I eventually believed she was not of this world, that she came from a place more resplendent than anything Earth – already so rich – could offer us.
Reaching these last few layers was an act of faith, both for her to dare showing them to me, and for me to dare looking at it. As if at the end of her hands lay the essence of her existence, which her whole being endeavored to protect. In the face of how easily one could break her heart, one had to be doubly vigilant not to do the same with her soul.
