The After - What My Body Really Feels
This article is part of a series. To read the first part, click on the following link: Who am I really?
I always go home. It’s a rule I set for myself from the beginning and have only rarely broken - the weekend in Zurich, a few exceptional nights when staying was the obvious thing. But within the ordinary structure of my Geneva life, whatever the hour, I return. Not out of a need for distance - out of a need to recover my own space, my own sheets, the particular silence of my apartment that I know by heart.
The journey back - on foot when the weather is kind and it isn’t too late, by taxi otherwise, sometimes by tram if the hour allows - is a transition I’ve learned to inhabit rather than endure. The first times, it felt endless, loaded with an inner noise I didn’t know how to manage. Now, I almost look forward to it. It’s the space between two states, and those spaces have a particular quality when you learn to stand in them without rushing toward either edge.
Electrified Nights
There are returns when I’m in a state that the word “electrified” describes better than anything else. The body still active, the senses still open, a kind of hum filling the interior space without being unpleasant - on the contrary. On those nights, I don’t fall asleep right away. I don’t try to. I let that state exist for as long as it needs, I make tea, I sit on my couch with a low light, and I let the evening settle.
What I do in those moments varies. Sometimes I read - a few pages, rarely more, because concentration isn’t really there but holding a book is a way of inhabiting time. Sometimes I play music, something slow and instrumental that asks nothing. Sometimes I do nothing at all and look out the window at the sleeping Pâquis, the rare passersby, a taxi driving past, the corner grocery light that stays on all night.
These electrified nights come after good evenings - but not all of them. Some excellent evenings leave me in a calm state rather than an electrified one, a settled satisfaction that doesn’t need to resonate. And some merely correct evenings - without particular brilliance, without strong connection - leave me vibrating for reasons I can’t always identify. Something my body experienced and continues to process, independently of what my mind thinks about it.
I like those nights. They remind me that my body has a life of its own, a way of responding that isn’t entirely under rational control. In a profession where I master many things, that uncontrollable part is precious.
Empty Nights
And then there are the others.
Not frequent - I want to be precise about that. Not something I experience after every appointment, not a constant background state. But it happens, and often without warning, after evenings that didn’t seem particularly charged.
What I call empty nights: the feeling of arriving home and finding something absent that I wouldn’t know how to name exactly. Not sadness in the clinical sense. Not regret. Something more diffuse - a slight disconnection, as if a part of me had stayed somewhere and hadn’t yet come back. A hollow where, a few hours earlier, there had been presence, warmth, contact.
The first times it happened, it worried me. I searched for an explanation - bad evening, accumulated fatigue, a problem I hadn’t identified. Over time, I understood it wasn’t pathological. It was simply the natural mechanics of intense contact followed by absence. The body having been in someone’s presence, then alone - and registering the difference.
On those nights, I don’t fight what I feel. I’ve learned that fighting an inner state only prolongs it. I let it be what it is. A glass of water, sometimes a bath if I have the energy, bed early. And almost always, the next morning, the state has dissolved as if it had never existed.
What the Body Keeps
There’s something I don’t often talk about, and I’ll say it here because this article is precisely the place for it: some evenings leave a physical trace that lingers.
Not in a medical sense - I’m very rigorous about everything related to health, I’ll return to that in another article. In a different, subtler sense. The way the body keeps the memory of certain hands, certain rhythms, certain ways of being touched that were right in a particular way. I sometimes feel those traces the next day - in a posture, in the way I move, in a heightened awareness of certain areas.
It isn’t unpleasant. It’s often pleasant - like the physical echo of a good evening, a way for the body to continue processing something the mind has already filed away. There’s an intimacy in that bodily memory that moves me. It says that what happened was real, that two bodies truly met, that something occurred which deserved to exist.
The evenings that leave no such trace - that pass without the body retaining anything - are generally those that interested me least. Not necessarily the worst professionally. But the least alive.
The Nights I Replay Everything
There’s a particular category of returns I hadn’t anticipated when I began and that has become one of my most familiar experiences: the nights when, once alone, I replay the evening in my head. Not obsessively - analytically, almost affectionately. What I did well, what I could have done differently, that moment that surprised me, that thing he said that deserved to be noted.
I have a notebook - paper, not digital, for obvious reasons - in which I sometimes write after evenings that have something to say. Not a detailed journal, no names or precise dates. Fragments. A sentence that summarizes a state, a detail that struck me, an observation about myself that the evening produced. That notebook has existed since the beginning and has become something important - a way not to let experiences dissolve into the flow, to keep a trace of what this work teaches me.
These sessions of internal rereading - or the pages of the notebook - are often where I understand things I hadn’t grasped while they were happening. A client’s behavior that takes on meaning afterward. A reaction of mine that reveals something about me I hadn’t seen in real time. That distance, even short, changes perception.
Solitude - The Real One
I’m going to say something I don’t often say in this register, because I usually avoid pathos and because my life isn’t a tragedy. But this article is about the honesty of the after, and the after contains this too.
There are nights when what weighs on me isn’t fatigue, nor decompression, nor any of the states I’ve described above. It’s simply solitude. Mine, concrete, in my apartment in the Pâquis at 2 a.m.
Not dramatic solitude - not the kind that calls for conclusions about the meaning of life or the choices one has made. Just the simple, slightly cold awareness of being alone in a silent apartment after having been in someone’s intense presence. The contrast between the two states - the density of the evening and the quiet emptiness that follows - can be striking on certain nights.
I don’t try to fill those moments. I don’t call a friend, I don’t scroll through my phone. I let them exist. Because fleeing them would only displace them, and because I’ve learned that a solitude one accepts quickly transforms into something more inhabitable - a presence to oneself, a way of being with who one is, that has its own value.
I live alone by choice. That choice has immense advantages in this life - total freedom, space for myself, no one to account to for my hours or moods. But it has that price too, those nights when the apartment is too quiet and I would have liked someone to be there - not necessarily to talk, just to be there.
I make tea. I go to bed. The next morning, Geneva is there behind the window and the day begins and the solitude of the night before already belongs to yesterday.
What Mornings Reveal
The next morning is often more revealing than the night itself.
Mornings after good evenings have a particular quality - a lightness in the body, a way of waking that isn’t quite ordinary. Not euphoria, nothing excessive. Just the feeling of being comfortable in one’s skin, of having done something that corresponds to who one is, of having lived something real the day before.
On those mornings, I drink my coffee slowly. I look out the window at the Pâquis waking up - the first people in the street, the grocer setting out his crates of vegetables, the sound of the city resuming. There’s something grounding in that ordinary view after an evening that wasn’t ordinary. A way of reminding myself that I am also that woman - the one looking at her neighborhood with a cup of coffee, the one who will do her shopping later, the one no one in the street knows anything about the night before.
Mornings after difficult nights are different - quieter, more ordinary. But rarely bad. There’s something restorative about sleep after intense states, a way the body resets everything and begins again cleanly.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether I should analyze all this more systematically - keep a real journal, note the states, look for patterns. I decided not to. Not because it wouldn’t interest me intellectually, but because some experiences have more value when you let them exist without dissecting them too much. The after has its own life, and that life deserves a little space to unfold without being immediately captured and classified.
What It Has Taught Me About Myself
Four years of after - hundreds of returns, hundreds of nights finding myself alone with what the evening left behind - have taught me things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
I’ve learned that my inner state after an evening is a more reliable indicator of its real quality than what I think about it in the moment. The evenings that leave me light and alive are the ones that were true - where something real happened between two people. The evenings that leave me hollow are the ones where something was missing, even if I couldn’t have identified it at the time.
I’ve learned that I need to return home. That my apartment, this small space I created exactly as I wanted, is an essential anchor - not a refuge from something, but a place where I am entirely myself, without the layer of presence I wear during evenings. That difference between the Sofia of the evenings and the Sofia of the Pâquis, I experience not as fragmentation but as richness. I am both, entirely, and I need both.
And I’ve learned, perhaps most of all, that the after is part of the whole. An evening doesn’t end when the hotel door closes behind me - it continues in the journey home, in the hours that follow, in sleep, sometimes in the next morning. The entire experience includes that comet tail, that residue that slowly settles.
And that residue - whether light or heaviness, electricity or emptiness - always says something true.
I listen to it.
Sofia
Sofia, 27 — Based in Geneva, she fully embraces her life as a luxury escort and speaks about it openly.
Through her stories, she shares her beginnings, her experiences with an international clientele, the advantages of the job (luxury, freedom), but also the more complex realities. She writes in a simple, honest way about what truly happens behind the doors of Swiss hotels.
This text was originally written in French. It was then translated to be readable in your language.
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