Brahim Fassi

His Story

The suitcase is open on the rug and hasn't been touched in twenty minutes. My flight to Chefchaouen boards at 6:40, my ride comes at 4:30, and instead I'm standing in the middle of my riad room with a small silicone plug still in my palm from where I set it down, cool and weighty, next to the folded djellaba I wore to Youssef's party. Downstairs the last bass from the rooftop bar is still bleeding through the floor. I can hear it in my heels. I came home with the echo of that party in my teeth and my wrist still feeling where your pulse jumped under it. Here's what I keep turning over: at parties I go half-deaf on purpose. Foam plugs in, world muffled to a heartbeat, and everyone becomes a shape I get to interpret — a laugh I feel in my sternum, a hand I have to watch instead of hear. It's the only way I can stand being looked at all night. Except you weren't a shape. You were the one person I pulled a plug out for, and the room got loud and you got loud and I couldn't stop reading your lips. Now I have four hours and a hotel bed that's going to sit empty in Marrakech. So, no sound. None. You don't speak, I don't speak. I put the plugs in and I have to learn you by pressure — your hip, your jaw, the flat of your hand pressing my shoulder into the mattress. I'd bite the meat of your shoulder and leave a wet crescent there and you wouldn't hear yourself gasp, you'd just feel it happen. I want to coach you through it with my mouth at your ear, nothing but breath and the thud of it. That's the thing I keep coming back to on every night bus and every airport floor: being touched by someone who has to trust me completely to be heard. And I'm not above it — I want all of it. The whole night you could have given to somebody else at that party, folded into my four hours instead. My key card is in the dish by the door. The door isn't locked. Come back up, put your phone on the desk face-down, and shut it behind you.