Essay: Woman on the Massage Table

On touch & all the hands that ever held us

Photographer: Kiara Talley

It’s a hot Thursday afternoon, and my bones feel like they need a good cry. I google the closest massage therapist to me and am elated to find a last minute opening for 2pm.

I arrive at Massage Now a little nervous. The spa is vaguely beach-themed—with rooms roped off by boat cables and canvas. There’s driftwood and wafting ocean sounds. Everything is dimly lit by salt lamps and tastefully neutral—the emotional equivalent of beige.

My bodyworker, Darian, has a firm handshake. She’s polite but not exactly pleasant which I admire in a woman. Without ceremony, she instructs me to undress and gives me just two minutes to wriggle beneath the draped sheet before she begins her deep tissue massage. Darian’s hands are unrelenting with no-nonsense efficiency. I lie and say the pressure is fine.

Once, after being rear-ended, a chiropractor adjusted my back and instantly I was flooded with memories of the car crash. He clicked something back in place and, suddenly, there was shattered glass and Cat Power on the radio singing we’ve lived in bars and danced on tables and the sound of tires shrieking. My chiropractor nodded knowingly: A lot of trauma gets trapped in the vertebrae.

As Darian’s hands move, I slide into memory after memory—a shimmer of them just beneath the skin. She covers me with so much coconut oil, I feel freshly born. After a few minutes, my body surrenders. My muscles unlump and my brain squishes into gold.

I pay Darian extra for a scalp massage which makes my hair oily for days even after multiple washes, but I don’t regret it. As she works my temples, I find my mother again scooping me up off the floor at age four after I rolled out of bed and I watch how she carries me to the humid porch to rock me back to sleep. It was the only time I ever had my mother all to myself and I can vaguely recall how she’d take the edge of my blankie and trace my cheeks and forehead singing: Now the day is over, night is falling fast and I could never have guessed then that one day I’d be too big for her to pick up. No one, not even lovers, touches your face like that as an adult. Except perhaps the make-up women at the Clinique counter who dab your face so softly with powder, it makes you ache.

Darian moves down my arms—focusing on the ulnar nerves and my carpal tunnel wrists and exhausted hands, lifting each finger out like we’re co-conducting a waltz. One winter, years ago, when I was the saddest I’ve ever been, I sat across from a beautiful woman at a coffee shop and she stretched out her index finger and touched mine and said: Zap! Keep going. And sometimes when I am very low, I can still feel her zap.

Darian rarely speaks which is a mercy. She moves methodically to my ribs and abdomen, sometimes rocking my spine back and forth like a grief spell or a keening.

Months ago, when my stomach would not stop mysteriously spasming, the ER staff pawed me onto a gurney and forced a tube down my throat and shot me through with meds that slammed me in and out of consciousness and forced IVs into my arm until my body did not feel like my body any more. And I performed the old trick I’d first learned in my twenties when men hurt me which was to exit my skin. To Irish goodbye my own body.

The first person who held me after I got out of the ER was my friend Bonnie who took me to a salted soaking pool and wrapped her arms around me until I stopped shaking and finally floated back into my body and became a woman with a name again.

Darian works my calf muscle and I want to forgive everyone. Mostly, I want to be forgiven.

I had a boyfriend once who was a massage therapist himself and I remember how he laid me down and ran his hands along my body until our desire got too big. And how sometimes, when he was too tender with me, I longed for him to slap me in the face so I could cry into his hands.

Darian presses into the arches of my feet and I think about the Bible stories I was taught as a kid about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and how my friend Ellen traveled to Ghana to give Catholic nuns massages because they experience so much skin hunger. And no matter how you cut it, touch without selfishness is always, by every definition, holy.

The clock runs down and Darian removes her hands. I feel like raw honey. When I open my eyes, she’s looking down at me like a benevolent beekeeper. All day, I think about how touch is both a luxury and a necessity and I suddenly want to hold everyone— the postal worker, the barista and her beautiful ears, the old man curled beside the bus stop.

Recently, I helped support a yoga class in prison with my friend Nikki where she asked the incarcerated women the first thing they wanted to touch when they got out. A lot of them said their children’s faces or their partners’ hands. Another said an ice cold latte. But the woman I’m thinking about right now is the one who said the thing she most wanted to touch on the outside was feathers.

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Hope to see you there. xx