The Ritual of Undressing

Undress slowly. Not for me, though I will admit I like knowing that you do. Slowly because of what the slowness does to you.

There is a thing that happens between the door of the house and the middle of the room, and most people never notice it because they move through it at speed. You come home wearing the day. Not only the clothes, which are the least of it, but the posture you held for hours, the voice you used with people who required a particular version of you, the shape you took to fit a room that was not built for your comfort. All of that is worn. All of it comes off, or none of it does, and if none of it does then you take the whole day into the evening with you and wonder why nothing reaches you.

So I ask for the undressing to be deliberate. One thing at a time. Set them down rather than dropping them. It seems like fussiness. It is not. It is the oldest technology we have for marking that one state has ended and another may begin. Every serious thing humans do, they do with a threshold in front of it. You wash your hands before you handle something precious. You take your shoes off at certain doors. The action is trivial and the meaning is not, because the meaning was never in the action. It was in the fact that you agreed to perform it before you were permitted to proceed.

I am not interested in your body in the way you might assume. That is not a rejection, it is a clarification. Bodies are easy and they are everywhere and anyone with an appetite can have one. What is rare is a man who will stand in his own room and remove his clothes with attention, knowing that no one is watching, because he was told to and because he has agreed that the telling matters. That is not display. Display needs an audience. This is closer to the opposite. This is what you do when you are alone with the fact of having agreed.

Notice what your hands do when you are hurrying. They are careless and they are slightly ashamed, and you will find you are already halfway to the next thing before you have finished this one. Then notice what happens when you refuse to hurry. There is a small resistance in you, a pull towards efficiency, towards getting on with it, towards the part you actually came for. Feel that pull and do not obey it. Obey me instead. The pull is the day, still talking. The slowness is you, arriving.

By the time you are ready you should feel slightly unfamiliar to yourself. Not exposed, exactly. Unarmoured. The difference is that exposure happens to you and unarmouring is something you have done. One is a violation and the other is an offering, and they can look identical from the outside while being opposite from within.

And then, only then, we begin. Not because I needed you undressed. Because you needed to have crossed something to get here, and I would rather you crossed it on purpose than stumbled over it without noticing. The evening is different when you have arrived at it deliberately. You will find that everything after lands deeper, and you will think it is because of what I said. It is partly because of what I said. It is mostly because of how you came.