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1. It's All Flat Now

   12.Sep.07, 21:03 EDT
   
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   It's All Flat Now
   
   (I gave a friend several massage therapy sessions as she was recovering from a double-mastectomy. After my first visit, I jotted this down on the number 3 train back to Brooklyn.)
   
   She sweeps the palm of her hand from the collar of her T-shirt to the zipper of her pants and says, "It's all flat now, just flat."
   
   I look, not sure if I ever really noticed her breasts before. She says they were a double-d cup size. That's a lot of breast. Now she is flat, looks thinner, her arm gestures longer and more graceful than I remember. Or is it that she is moving slowly? Or is it that fighting cancer means every move she makes holds resonance for me. Sitting across from her on a cozy sofa in her sweet apartment, as massage therapist to a patient undergoing chemotherapy, we now get to know each other in a different way.
   
   (I’m so aware to be myself for her and sublimate my ego-feeding habits. She has scary cells growing in her body, and my busy mind scans through my way of thinking, "What's the cure?," "Where does cancer come from?," "Who's responsible?" NO! My friend is here looking at me as my brain fights my heart to rule my facial expressions.)
   
   My place of ease? Touch. That's what I do. I went to massage school so I could get a license to heal people with touch. I am impatient with words and friendship rituals and religion and faith. Honestly, the only thing I believe in is touch.
   
   She's irritated at the nausea, the weak and hollow feeling, and the not eating enough. I fit  a massage table in a tiny square of space in her bedroom. She makes the simplest request: “I want something to make me feel better.” The massage is a massage. It is hard to explain how much and how little goes into it: everything I know, nothing predetermined or expected, divine variations in weight and pressure. I wait for muscles, tightened by events that don't exist in this moment, to relax now.

   
   

   Then there's the showing of the scars, and my absolutely-no-problem with introducing light massage along the lines. She has a slight sensation of numbness along the scars on her chest, and hasn't been doing self-massage. But it has been two months since surgery, so the healing is done and it's time to start bringing circulation to the scar tissue and realigning the fibers so they stretch with elasticity. Yes, that's what time it is. I bring my hands down to her chest and armpits for the laying-on-of-hands kind of thing, and instantly I feel light, as if some of her body's unwanted energy does a liftoff and disappearance act.

   
   

   After the session, she mentions that same moment, as if the weight of her worries and anxiety had lifted. At that, she smiled.