Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [58]
He encourages me to breathe, to make noises—part of the “release”—if I’m so inclined. The firm and easy series of strokes, gentle but somehow driving, leading the experience forward, is punctuated by permission, injunctions to feel. He mentions how much I’ve been holding, he says there is so much grief in my body.
He arrives at my hips, my lower back. I am lying on my back now, eyes closed, and he’s lifting my legs and rotating the thighs in their sockets, pushing, circling, reversing the circles. He lifts my right leg in the air and pushes it toward the left side, so that my leg is crossed over my body, stretching out the muscles deep in the right hip, stroking the long tendon along the back of my right quadriceps with a firm, long stroke, his thumb pushing deep toward the bone. And I feel everything shift. My face contorts, involuntarily. Without any warning, with knowing first what I feel, I burst into tears. The grief, the knowledge of grief, isn’t in my head; the knowing is locked up in my thighs. What my body knows comes welling up, shaking me, deep quaking indrawn breaths and sobs. He keeps touching me, easily; he covers my face with a cloth so that I will not be ashamed. He enjoins me to let it out but I don’t need any more coaching. I couldn’t stop if I tried; a deep well of the darkest and most brackish water of myself has been tapped, an arterial spring held under tremendous pressure. Except that we think of springs as clear, pure water, and this is the fountain of sheer darkness, interior geyser of bitterness held at such depths it pours forth laying waste, burning everything in its path. How did I ever contain it? These great breathless heaving sobs are mine. I let them rumble and tear loose, rising up out of me into the air. I am literally and metaphorically naked, helpless, entirely vulnerable, and for some reason I feel completely safe, able to give myself over to this pouring out of myself. When we talk about being self-conscious, we’re really talking about being aware of others; to be self-conscious is to be afraid of being judged. What I felt was self-possessed, in the old sense of possession: fully entered and inhabited by myself, purely immersed in this body’s grief.
And not just the sorrow of grief. But the rage of it, too, the salty choking bitterness, the self-pity and incoherence and ferocious negation of it.
The freeing, fierce negation.
The massage ended in peace and stillness; one can weep so much, and then that purging leaves us exhausted, quieted. Some unidentifiable plant essence, odor of earth and crushed leaves (“Egyptian oil,” he later told me it was called) was held under my nose. A prayer to Shiva, god of destruction and dissolution; if the forces of the world dissolve people, dissolve what we love, then they also dissolve tension, pain, difficulty.
My pain—in the suddenly infinite, enormous room—dissolving into this music, some chant on the tape player. Then stillness.
I walked home deeply relaxed, enervated, exhausted. And after throwing a few things in a bag for the morning plane I slept dreamlessly, deeply, given a little hiatus from pain.
Which reappeared in the morning, an ache becoming more pronounced by the time I caught my second airplane of the day, a Boston to La Guardia shuttle, a pillow behind my sacrum, shifting as much as possible in my seat belt to keep the muscles loose. A taxi to my friend Jean’s apartment on 110th and Broadway—empty, since she’s married an Irish painter and spends half of each year there, though the space she’s inhabited is full of her calm radiant depths, her quiet—and then straight to bed, into a sleep from which I wake, early in the afternoon, to the strange sensation of having all of New York City around me, and no stamina to participate in any of its huge, indifferent,