Needles

He would gently places the bottoms of his four fingers on various places on her body and move them back and forth like he was erasing something delicate. It felt, quite possibly, like the most tender gesture she had ever experienced from a man. Though it was a comfortable thought, it wasn’t true. Spread out and distinct in her history, there was a kiss on her shoulder in the morning, a kiss in her hand in the middle of the night, the tracing of the back with one finger, and the embrace that lasted an eternity- all given by men. His motive was different, he was hurting her and he had to counter his painful touch with some care, so she could keep going. It was a necessary touch and one that glued her pain to him.

She started to breath and they got into their rhythm. She breathed in, long, full, as if she was scuba diving and trying to maintain her depth under water. He put it in, she tried not to anticipate the pain, and was constantly relieved each time when it went in without her really feeling it. “Wait you are putting them in my neck. I thought you weren’t going to.”
“I thought you said you wanted them in your neck.”
“No. Oh well. Here we go.” He had already started. There was no going back. Her neck had been in knots for two weeks. She was afraid the muscles would grip the needles like a tug-of-war rope.

He was getting into her shoulders, another set of bumpy muscles. She was worried about the needles in her neck and along with that worry she lost her focus on breathing right as he put one in. With her deep vocal chords, she exclaimed “owwww!”
“I thought we were on rhythm.”
She spoke into the floor, her head nestled into the cushioned hole. “We were, I just started focusing on my neck.”
“Oh. Is it okay now?”
“Yes…wait.” He waited.

Somewhere along the way that trust had developed. They had duties. It was her sole responsibility to know how she felt and to tell him. He listened. He could not and would not feel for her. When she first came into his office months before, she was prepared to be his passive patient, to listen to him about her problems and for him to fix her. But he could only give her information about what he told her. So she started to talk about her strange pains and their strange places and her hypothesis for how they came about. He listened. He explained the body to her. And each time as each acupuncture session delivered different results, sometimes she felt better, sometimes worse, she realized that her pain is hers. It was not something to be interpreted by the doctor cleric. Her pain was the interpretation, and they would have to understand the actual cause together. They had to use his knowledge about the body and hers about hers to solve this problem. Her body's management could not be outsourced. The unspoken rules guided them.

She got back into her pace. “Ok go ahead.” He dropped a few in and then hit another soft spot. She screamed. Her hands stretched out, facing the ceiling. He erased her lower back with his fingers. She was distracted by that touch. Seconds passed and he put his hand in hers. That’s what she wanted, she needed his hand. She squeezed it.
“How many more?”
“Two.”

She focused on him and where his movements were so she could time her breath. Her breath in was when the needle had to go in. The breath out gave her no protection. She felt his fingers hover above her spine, he was finding the spot. He nudged the muscle, he was getting ready, he said “deep breath” she did, her body rose and he put it in. It was getting to be difficult. She felt like she was in a torture chamber, and her mentor, her guru, her samurai was testing her to bring her to herself.

Immediately she was in tears.
“Oh no, come on no.” Her emotions were ahead of her, racing past her, that she felt that perhaps there was no sadness, instead the tears were a tool, a way to escape the task at hand and surrender. She breathed and halted the tears. They were endless and she had needles in her back, time was not a luxury she could afford. He began to erase her lower back. What hurts?”
“My neck.” He took the two needles out of her neck.
“How’s that”
“Better” She couldn’t really know, all the needles and the muscles had smushed into a ball of sensation and it was becoming impossible to pinpoint a specific spot of discomfort or pain. She feared the rest.

“What do you want me to do?”
“Can you do my lower back separate from my upper back?”
“Then you will be here for hours.”
She knew he would say that. She just could not muster the courage to take any more needles but she wanted, for the sake of understanding her body, to continue.
“How many are going to do?”
“Just those two that we talked about.” Before she laid on the table that day, before she had changed into her robe, they had discussed the last session. She canceled her first appointment the week before because she didn’t have the gumption to go. He had put two needles symmetric to each other, which he hypothesized was the cause of her continuous diarrhea the week before. Apparently the spot loosened a muscles that squeezes the stomach. He wanted to test his hypothesis. She did too.

“Okay.”

He began to touch her bottom vertebrae as if uncovering delicate artifacts under a pile of sand. He pushed around each vertebrae until he found the one he was looking for. He then moved away from it, only using it as a marker. She felt him search the map of her back for the magical point. He found it. “Deep breath.” She breathed in, but this time it was no protection, the pain was real. “Wait.” She needed to recover.

He started to feel for the next spot. She heard him turn to the table, pick up a needle, unsnap its plastic top, throw it into the box. She breathed in and he put it in. The last one was gentle. She was relieved it was over.

He put the remote buzzer in her hand, to call him if she needs him. He covered her in the silver wrap like a stick of gum and pushed the heating lamp onto her. As he opened the door she delicately mentioned as if she herself was unsure “I am not sure if I will last the whole twenty minutes”
He walked back to her side.
“Why?
“My whole upper back is uncomfortable.” Each needle felt like it was pulling on the other one to make her back some sort of pulled piece of burlap. She wanted all of the needles out so the pain would disappear, she wanted immediate relief. She wanted to remove her porcupine back and curl up into a ball.
He was erasing her arm. “Oh well that’s, here, in your head. You can control this”

And that was it. The words. She had heard variation before, in pop psychology books, in great epics, in the stories of the mystics and in Hollywood. It wasn’t the ingenuity of the words. It was him. And it was her. She trusted him. He was so convicted about it, she believed him. “Okay.”He left.

She thought the way out of her head was into her body by breathing. But she had been breathing all along. So she started to repeat what he had said out loud “you can control this.” In repetition she stated the words over and over again. Her back and shoulders melted into the table as if she was sinking into quicksand. She felt them relax and stretch out. Her lips stopped moving but the words kept being said. She drifted into a place between awake and asleep.

Twenty minutes later he openly the door. He removed the needles. She couldn’t tell which were in and which were out so she asked him, “did you get all of them?”
“Yep, you can turn over.”
She peeled her face from the cushioned hole. The tears still sat on her eyelashes. Her face reflected emotional exhaustion, as if she had been told news that kept her in shock. She rolled over like her bones were made of baby cartilage, she could neither exert energy nor move fast. She laid there staring at the ceiling.

“Ok we are only going to six on this side. All of your parasympathetic spots, because your sympathetic system is in overdrive right now.” She breathed, he put two in her ears, two in her hands, two by her knees, and two into her feet. The hands and feet were always painful, always too much. She anticipated them, feared them, and breathed to forget them. They went in. The pain was minimal. She was alright. The hard part was over. He put the aluminum wrap on top of her and moved the heat lamp over her.

He came back twenty minutes later. She was fine. She could barely open her eyes. He began to pull the needles. Her left hand ached. The largest acupuncture spot, it touched the large intestine. He took out the needles and she curled into the fetal position. He had a magnesium and vitamin d shot for her. He stabbed her left gluteal muscle and pressed the spot so the serum spread throughout. She curled. She felt empty and incapable of movement. He leaned over her, "are you okay?"
"Yea."
"Take all the time you need to get up."
"Okay."

She did. She eventually pulled her body off the table. Her body's ability to do that surprised her, in her mind, her body had no muscle left. She buttoned her shirt. She was slow and low. Her face showed it. It felt like sadness, but it was more like defeat. Her young, ambitious, relentless mind and body succumbed to the needles. Though she had defeated the pain, her mind had been humbled, it was forced to stop fighting and let go. This was in some strange way a defeat.

She wanted him to hug her. She paid for the doctor's session and left. "see ya kiddo."

An old couple passed her as she walked slowly to the metro.