Asthma, or Something Like It

In porn, everyone moans. The women, the men, occasionally whoever’s behind the camera—all of it scored with this sustained respiratory theater that makes the whole thing sound like a group effort at starting a broken-down engine. Real bedrooms don’t sound like that.

Real bedrooms, in my experience, sound mostly like her. And silence from me.

The silence isn’t indifference. It’s concentration. There’s a whole internal filing system running during sex—images, memories, rhythms, timing—and the moment I start making noise I lose the thread. Some part of my brain mistakes expression for distraction and shuts the mechanism down entirely. Staying quiet isn’t stoicism. It’s self-preservation. Every sound I’d make would be performed rather than involuntary, and performed sounds feel like lying even during an activity that technically involves a lot of lying.

I’ve never fully understood her moaning. It could be physical—maybe the exertion genuinely forces breath out, the way a tennis player grunts mid-swing without deciding to. It could be communication, a real-time map of what’s working and what isn’t. Or some of it might be theater—not deception exactly, but a soundtrack she provides for the occasion, something to give whoever’s there a reason to feel accomplished. All three simultaneously is probably closest to accurate.

What I know for certain is that too much ruins it and too little reads as absence. The right amount is the amount that’s actually involuntary—which sounds obvious until you’re in the middle of it and realize both of you have been managing your own audio carefully the whole time, and neither of you mentioned it.

The neighbors already know, anyway.