A Meditation on Touch

R. Tiara Malone

Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,

What can I do to kill it and be free

In my old liberty?

"What can I do to Drive Away"

John Keats

Listen to me. I am telling you 

a true thing. This is the only kingdom. 

The kingdom of touching; 

the touches of the disappearing, things 

“Elegy" 

Aracelis Grimay

I want to glide my hands down the back of Mr. P. It is decorated with moles, pimples, craters...all kinds of things that make me want to run and vomit. But I can only think, who else will touch him? And isn't it my job to do so? To make him feel not less than, but part of, the kingdom of the touched.

Old man Joe is just that. An old man named Joe. He isn't a massage client like Mr. P. I can’t explain it, but the two worlds never meet. In fact, I've left that part of my existence in a vault, put it to sleep. Who even is that person? Right now, my career is that of a fantasy, a fallacy. I'm not really there with Joe at all. We meet weekly. My one headlight is out and my car note is due. It will only take Joe 1.5 minutes with the condom off but damn near 15 with it on. I am wearied. I am fresh out of hope for my newly single life. My degree is futile so I put my body to use. I have harvest that is always in season.

Mr. P is not more than a stranger. I can't quite call him a client yet. It doesn't matter if I do because someone will just ask me anyways: how can you touch strangers' backs all day? Except they ask with disgust, with disdain, with pity for poor me. But it is not the back that causes me pause. It is the truly intimate places: ears, hands, neck. These places put me close to the truth of a person. It’s a truth I don't always want to know.

I'm disgusted with the circumstances but I'm not disgusting for my participation and neither is Joe. The difference is quick capitalism versus waiting two weeks for a taxed deposit. The difference is choosing my own death which is an act of a revolutionary. We talk but we only talk past each other and not much louder than a whisper. It’s like we both understand: money in exchange for sex is dirty. It’s not the exchange that makes me feel dirty though. It’s that the exchange is so secret. So stifling and oppressive. More dangerous than it has to be because it is so secret, so stifling and oppressive. More danger.

Mr. P sometimes tells me stories about his body. I trace everything as he is recounting them: scar on his rib, pins in his neck, bulging discs here and there. I bounce my eyes to intercostals, then the sternocleidomastoid. I palpate his puffy erector muscles, wondering if I'll stumble on the bulging discs. Each time, I’m a doctor pressing on a pregnant woman's belly. I'm just trying to feel something, just checking for the life. I want to feel everything on the human body with my hands. I want my fingertips to birth a trueness.

Before I visit Joe, I stop by to see another friend. I realize when I say friend it is understood as "friend." This one is the least friendliest of them all but his easy rage and the not knowingness is the appeal. I like to be swallowed by the unseen. I like to explore dark places with dark people. Not dark because of their unspoken vices but because they are too much like me. And this friend drives a purple old model Buick. He creeps down dusty country streets until he finds his clientele. He serves them. I am too close to a darkness that doesn't belong to me. Since my forever started I've been playing with this portal, taunting it. Putting my body in way of new realities to grow, or end, myself. I'm getting closer. This friend activates a crazy-eyed fearlessness in me that continues to grow when he says he knows everything about me, my family, the cars we drive. I’m not scared. I double-dog dare him because I’m bound to snap--- I’ve been patient, too black and too woman, for too long. Been avoiding my own danger long enough.

Mr. P tells me more about his lifelong affair with injury and ailment. It's made him into an outsider, he's made peace with this. He tells me about how he towered above the other boys in early childhood. Says his body was prime for athletic stardom but that his back gave out at some point in high school. I don't want to touch him but I need to feel the history he speaks of. His body an illustration as he recounts his unrequited love for it. I don't understand being male or white or having disposable income but I understand alienhood. I need to feel his ticket to the Mothership, feel for myself what brought him here. My obsession for touching things as authentication is its own kind of religion, even if a faithless one.

I feel my way to the bedroom, traveling through Joe's ranch style house that's in urgent need of a deep de-junking. The opened and unopened mail mixed together, piled high on his wooden table. It's the same wooden table all the old black folks in the country have in the kitchen. It somehow withstands his hoarding---worn vintage hats, magazines that'll never be read again, remotes that control what? Joe hangs on to everything, his money especially. He pays me what we agree on because his value system is set up as such: a man does what he says he'll do. There are times when I phone Joe from my heaux line. I ask if he can advance me, pretend we're friends or something more than figures in the dark. He grumbles something about "the deal" when I try to persuade him to break our rules. I'd like to remind him that his daughter is my age, break the fourth wall and decimate the pact.

Sugar babies don't have degenerative discs. They have new, strong necks. The orthopedist doesn't bother to cater to my frail ego either. She doesn't say that early 30s is too young for my spine to be coming apart. She won't even acknowledge that I'm too fine to be carrying around words like degenerative. But since my days of exchange with Joe are long in my rear view, I use my neck for other services. I've return to serve in the ministry of massage. See it as an atonement for bending my body beyond its limits, for letting too many unknowns access it. I see it as my redemption of sorts, every session a homecoming. I don't view these bodies in a fleshly way, they don't make love or destroy. It's just a vessel in need. I'm a vessel being used, earning my prayers.

Even when my neck was new and young, it betrayed me. Brought me aches that made it painful to face daylight or another school day. I was always overly familiar with the nurse's office. Those hard cots tucked in a would be storage room that provided me a haven from the offensive fluorescent lights of science lab. Doctor after doctor, my condition was received as a general unwellness, at best. Largely medically dismissed, I learned to work with my neck troubles; made it work for me instead. At the slightest ache, I made known my inability to function as normal and took rest. Even then, I had been too black for too long and understood the respite as the perfect escape. A hiding place.

My last time seeing Joe is not memorable nor is it meant to be my last time. It just happens, much like our paths crossing to begin with. The laundromat is its own kind of church, a meeting place for transients and tramps. Miscreants and single mothers alike. Everyone is welcome to come as they are and leave with a cleansing if they'd like. The day I met Joe, I was looking for a rebirth. He must have smelled it on me, overpowering the scent of clean cotton was something else. Men like Joe know the scent of a woman birthing herself, know what to offer her for the journey. Now my body is starting to break from the weight of this man, this stealth coming and going, this transaction.

Bodies breaking is what I'm used to. For the greater part of the last 14 years, I've worked as a massage therapist. Intimacy is sacred to me, something about violating that space between myself and a client is iniquitous---the ancestors are watching. So I protect my clients’ modesty, pretend not to see scars or balding spots. I assure the women their lack of pedicure is a non-issue. I tell them men never apologize for their lack of grooming when they try to excuse the hair on their legs. I provide a safe space from the world, if only for 60 minutes. I offer them silent sessions, a haven from the noise outside but also a meditation for me. Silence has become one of my love languages during my career. Even after more than a decade, navigating or quieting talkative clients isn’t a skill I’ve mastered. Still, I remain open to the ones I feel a kinship with, talk them through it. Sometimes the somatic therapy isn’t enough for either of us. I pour into them, they feed me.

Being a somatic healer has been less about touch and more about human behaviors. Our differences and how stunningly similar we are. It’s made a psychologist of me. I mean to only touch, to simplify the noise, not understand people but somehow I can’t do one without the other. I’m a healer, unafraid to sit in silence and willingly search for what hurts. I need to see, touch, for myself what the affliction is. It’s the same curiosity that drove me to Joe’s, put me in the front seat of that purple Buick. Only then I was touching my own suffering, feeling my own pain; going through it to get through it. It’s the same curiosity that drives my fingertips down Mr. P’s graphic back, gloves and all.

Mr. P thanks me, not just in gratuity. He thanks me with the understanding that his was not an easy back to withstand in sight, let alone touch. He understands that his body has put him on the outside of touch. That I provided a rare thing, professional or not. This session is my last with Mr. P. It psychically signals to me that it is nearing time to close my books, indefinitely. My spirit tells me before my body does and I know the perils of disobedience to the spirit.

There are stretches of time when my neck isn’t at war with me. It cooperates, does its job quietly. I haven’t discovered any hard patterns to the quiet times so I never look forward to them. This lack of pattern makes for a deeper sense of gratitude though. I never take the body for granted, never assume it will perform for me. I show appreciation for it, thank my Creator for it in prayer. Because I know the body to be labile, my devotion to touching it is that much more sacred. As I prepare for this exit from massage, I think, what else to do with my hands? Writing is all heart, I don’t necessarily need hands for that. So what now, where to place my hands? I celebrate in this new obedience to spirit while the answer makes it way to me. It is being carried to me, the ancestors are watching, still.