these hands
I get home early one day and book myself a massage. There is a massage place a few blocks from me, Massage Ultra. It seems forsaken, in a sort of overworked, typecast adjective sort of way. I’ve never seen anyone go in. I hardly ever go myself, but lately I’ve renewed my interest, wondering who else keeps their business alive.
This Massage Ultra seems to be run by mostly Chinese people. Today my masseuse asks me what part hurts.
Shoulder? Back?
My brain, I want to reply. I wonder if it ever occurred to her that sometimes people get massages just for fun, and not because something hurts. Or maybe everyone has a part of them that hurts, always.
Try as I might, I can’t turn my brain off. At some point, I must have grumbled, because she asks me if she’s pushing too hard.
It’s okay to say, she says in Mandarin. You can tell me.
No, it’s fine, I mumble, finally mustering the confidence to reply.
I think about the time I shadowed a massage therapist during my Palliative Care elective in medical school. We went to the bedside of a patient in the Intensive Care Unit who was awaiting a heart transplant. David, the massage therapist, took off the blue padded boots the patient was wearing to prevent bedsores. He started massaging the man’s shins. A look of relief crossed the patient’s face. Afterwards, his wife told us that it was the most pain-free she had ever seen him. This must be the real healing touch, I thought. I think of Natalie Diaz’s poem, These hands, if not God’s… I think about all the things I do on a regular basis—pelvic exams, forceps, c-sections, hysterectomies—and that, sometimes, it feels like the opposite of healing.
These hands, my masseuse exclaims. I think my little son’s hands are the same as yours!
(I wear the smallest size surgical gloves—5.5—and I have spent the last three years debating whether this is a good or a bad thing.)
Face scrunched into the massage pillow, I can’t see her face, but she puts her hand over mine, as if to make her point. It feels weary and familiar. I try to imagine all the bodies these hands have soothed, and all that mine have poked and prodded. I have been everywhere in the human body, spent hours examining every nook and cranny, yet some days I wonder where true healing lives.
It has to run deeper.