There was a time when your body spoke a language you understood without having to translate. Hunger arrived and you ate. Tiredness came and you slept. Desire flickered and you recognised it immediately, and sometimes you followed it where it led and sometimes you did not, but you did not confuse it for something else.

Somewhere along the way, you stopped understanding the words.

It does not happen in a single moment. There is no hinge you can point to. A relationship goes quiet in the bedroom and you reassure yourself that this is what everyone describes, that desire fades when you live alongside someone for long enough, that the absence is normal. Work demands more and you give it more, treating fatigue as a virtue rather than a signal. Someone, at some point, criticises the shape of your body, and from that day forward your body becomes a project to be managed rather than a place to live.

You learn to override the signals. To ignore the tightness in your chest when you are touched in a way that feels dutiful rather than wanted. To dismiss the flutter of attraction that arrives at an inconvenient moment, at the wrong person, in the wrong room, for the wrong reason. To treat arousal like an irritation, something that interrupts the real work of the day. The body, being wise, eventually gives up on trying to tell you these things. It stops bothering. It goes underground.

This is how you arrive, years later, in a bed with someone, perhaps a long partner, perhaps yourself, and feel nothing. Not pain. Not pleasure. Just an eerie absence, as though you are watching the scene from the ceiling. You perform gestures you remember from a time when your body participated, but your body has stepped out of the room.

You begin to wonder if this is simply what midlife is. If everyone you know feels this anaesthetised and is, like you, politely not mentioning it. If desire is a thing that belonged to a younger woman, a younger man, a younger version of you who had time for such indulgence. The story is convenient because it excuses you from having to do anything about it.

Desire does not actually disappear. It goes underground, which is not the same thing. It keeps transmitting from below the floorboards. It shows up in strange places. In the catch of breath when a particular song starts. In the way you linger over a scene in a film when you thought you had stopped caring about that sort of scene. In dreams you wake from feeling more alive than you have felt in months, and which you let dissolve before breakfast because the waking life does not seem to have anywhere to put them.

The body is still speaking. You have stopped translating.

The reconnection, when it begins, almost never starts where you expected. Rarely in a bedroom. Rarely through the specific door marked desire. It arrives through other senses first. You notice how good the sun feels on your bare arms. You realise you have been holding your shoulders up around your ears for most of this decade, and finally, without fanfare, you let them drop. You touch your own skin in the shower and remember, with something like surprise, that you live here. That this is not just a container to carry your head from meeting to meeting. That there is a whole animal in here that has been waiting.

Sometimes the reconnection begins with saying no. To a kind of sex that has been functioning more like an obligation than a meeting. To a touch that leaves you farther from yourself rather than closer. The body responds to honesty the way a plant responds to water after a long drought. At first you would not even notice. Then, one morning, everything is faintly different.

There will be grief to move through. The years of going through the motions. The intimacy that happened without you really present for it. The desire you dismissed as inappropriate when it was perhaps simply yours, and therefore legitimately inconvenient, and therefore legitimately real. You may find yourself, strangely, mourning an appetite you had been trying to be rid of for years.

Listening again means tolerating the discomfort of actually feeling. Of noticing that some touch leaves you cold and other touch wakes something you had forgotten was there. Of acknowledging attraction you cannot or will not act on, but also will not pretend is absent. Of sitting with the loneliness of inhabiting a body inside a relationship in which bodies have stopped speaking to each other. Of accepting that your body might want things your current life cannot accommodate, and that this does not oblige you to burn the life down, but it does oblige you to stop lying to yourself about what is happening inside your own skin.

Reconnection is not tidy. It does not arrive with a solution attached. It simply returns information to you that you have been refusing for years.

Here is what the body does when you start listening again. It forgives. It does not hold grudges about the years you ignored it. It does not require you to fix everything immediately. It begins, quietly, to offer data. What opens you and what closes you. What makes you feel more yourself and what makes you feel like a rehearsal of someone else. You do not have to act on every piece of information. You only have to stop pretending you are not receiving it.

The body you stopped listening to is still here. Still breathing. Still capable of pleasure and connection and unbidden aliveness. Still trying to tell you things that matter.

It has been waiting. Patiently. The way bodies do.