An anti-aging massage for wrinkles and mother wounds.
“The truth is,” the fortune teller said in the film Only You, “you make your own destiny.” A phrase in a movie that makes me laugh, one I watched more than once for legitimate reasons. I went to Italy for the first time in 1994. I was nine. Practicing self-care, an anti-aging massage on YouTube almost thirty years later, I never thought I would find myself here, I gotta tell you, back then, in Istanbul…starting over with a rose quartz roller.
I listened to a couple of the older and wiser, actually, in my youth and understood with a lack of results on paper before me, you know, the material proof that an approach works, that I had to reach into myself for guidance. I had a knack for finding someone who wanted to shape me or who felt they knew a thing or two except everyone does. I believe the thing to do in extending a hand to another is draw out their inner wisdom. It is not the wiseman who acts like one but the one who faces another as one. That’s a little Buddhism for you.
Apply minimal pressure when massaging the face, she suggests. I had to get softer on myself; harder isn’t necessarily better. I had to be honest, with face oils to lubricate the skin, about what felt good to me. I don’t have many wrinkles but this is preventative care as aging is practically a sickness except I appreciate getting older; we’re here to live a life. People don’t even make it to a wrinkle, sometimes tragically. And if you really want to live forever, past the age of a hundred that is, the data doesn’t lie: move to Japan and eat sweet potatoes.
People make mistakes. People made mistakes. I made mistakes. And for all mistakes real and imagined, I forgive myself. I guess there’s no such thing. We can make stupid decisions though. I made many. I had to get out of relationships in which I felt I wasn’t there or they weren’t. “You you you” this type of person. You’re doing this. What about you? No, I had to consciously separate myself, say something like. “I don’t know if this applies to me so I will think about it. Sorry, both my parents were ill.” If you don’t know what’s going on, a piece of advice, just step out. If there’s no room for you, that is. Take responsibility — yeah, I built this bridge a long time ago. Maybe I’ll find you at the end of another one, one I’d like to build consciously, and if not, well, that says it all.
What I know is that there’s no ultimate framework. That might be consciousness but there’s no hierarchy, not in the absolute, that’s a thing humans do, which sometimes has caused me pain. Apparently, a sign of a clown. A good sign? I don’t know. I am applying light pressure at the brows, ironing out crowfeet in figure eights. I mean, does it work? You see? Results. Biden understands.
Every day I feel a little more full of possibility. I’ve let go of people, ideas; pieces of cotton, polyester; burned a couple of bridges, not real ones, the ones I built. Maybe our romances do run deep into the shadows of our childhoods but then I embraced my brightness, you know, the face that many many many people thought was just for show. My mother’s name was Joy, closer to rejoice. It was the only real thing in her, I thought, but it became a buffoonery in her. Flipped a switch. Brought it into a light, actually, that doesn’t negate the darkness.
I sold my clothes, my beautiful clothes, a couple of years ago to lighten the load, and out of necessity; they were my most valuable possessions. Family, you know, they betrayed me the hardest, treated me the most casually…I don’t know what to say about my father except you might just turn pain into gold so dig in like it’s real and heal to then share your riches with others. That’s the point, isn’t it? Connection, on some real level.
I think about the people who write lines that I read from years such as 1860, they come back to life in a way, reading about cockroaches. There’s very little that can’t be turned into a few compelling lines that someone might read. Someone wants to. I don’t care for cockroaches but someone cast a lens over a most repulsive creature, saw its value in exquisite detail. I liked the pictures. You know, my mother, I know, everyone exaggerates — this put me at a disadvantage — she made the woman who kept me for four years gag, shutter, cringe, stick her finger in her mouth: disgusting. Tried to see the value in it myself by examining it up close as a wee one. A beautiful woman too: Dr. J. I’m trying…to honestly describe what it was like. I did it out of love, too, didn’t I? Not sugarcoating the truth? Loving the whole somehow.
Like anyone else, at a large window, I had a frame through which I saw the world in a foreign country on top of it: Turkey. A definition of the ego I like is that “it sits on the windowsill between the inner and outer worlds” so we have more than one ego; frames, through which we see the world. Some, we aren’t even aware of, and I admire the view, the view, that’s coming into view. I admire the frame, the frames, taking shape, solid, wondering about the old ones, if I might have been harsh on myself but then, the most moving surprise? I got back even older frames that I had discarded because I was too scared to assume that perspective. I didn’t just trade the old for the new then but I got back the old, the old, meaning the young, what I loved back then. The whole thing did really shift — my perspective. I feel proud of myself today. You can feel that. When you slip into an old frame that doesn’t fit like an old dress. It just didn’t fit. It just doesn’t fit. Too small, maybe, in most cases. And then, the one that does — again! Maybe even better than before. There’s a whole world out there and some of it damn near scares me every day, just the range of behavior, so my mother becomes a salt crystal, one with the sea. There are so many unknowns. And yes, you know, it’s true, rage was love; to say to her, in a manner of speaking, “love is active, not ethereal.” I was taught very young that we sentence babies to cruel fates in the name of truth and that, you don’t have to inherit any of it. You don’t have to become your mother. You can change the story, you can change the story…leaning into my palms, spreading them across my cheeks, applying a little pressure on the temples, and sliding my fingers down my neck to open the lymphatic system. Drain the toxins. Repeat three times. Not the past. Time, also, heals.