My body was haunted. I had a pain in my neck. My arm hurt; it felt like a nerve was being pinched. I didn’t know what that meant. I wondered if he did. My left knee felt twisted and I had an ache in my side. My jaw was tight. Sometimes it was hard to hold myself up. I pointed out my sunken chest. I was uncomfortable sitting. My left shoulder was higher than my right, and my lower back hurt when I walked for a long time.

I said, “Maybe it’s because I’m tall. Everything is too low you know–chairs, tables, sinks, counters, even car seats. The world was designed for people 5 foot 4. Is it really true that you don’t cause the pain?

My friend Sue told me after the 7th session she broke out in adolescent acne for a year. I wondered if that was normal.

His hands worked like a potter. He said his mother had made hats in the garment district. There was a dried out snakeskin on the wall. Mexican music played from a radio next door. His thick fingers dug deep down into my flesh releasing the glue that held me together. He asked me to make small subtle movements. I lifted my knee, I moved my foot up and down, I rocked my pelvis, I slid my elbow out to the side and in again. He said things like, “Breathe into it.” And I did. “Breathe into this place. Invite my fingers in. Picture this melting, speading out, dissolving.”

I rode the pain through dense distorted fascia and fell into scary black holes. I shook from my core as my right ankle remembered the iron shackles twisting and rubbing against raw black skin.

My feet screamed away the memory of 8 hour days in high heeled shoes, aching arches and evenings spent disco dancing in those 6 inch open toed green and gold platforms.

When he started humming “Go Tell Aunt Rhody”, I wept for the dead gray goose and my lost childhood. His elbow pressed into my sacrum, and I remembered the year my spine grew 4 crooked inches and there was another divorce. I found my step-father hiding in my neck.

The taste of novocaine seeped from my jaws. And my mother melted out of my face.

Afterwards, I went home and ate mostly meat. I went to bed and dreamt of the time before the ghosts when I decided to grow this body tall from the inside out.Travels with Ida