The Road Trip to Me

I sit in a chair in a half-lit room. On the wall, a stunning painted canvas of black and white horses roaming in a pasture. “What’s going on?” Maia asks. I don’t know what to say, even though I’ve practiced my answer; her question elicits a mental brainstorm of answers.

Maia works Reiki on people and race horses. In town, she practices the form of energy healing in a new age store in the Old Port. In the past, she’s shared with me stories of how animals only know aliveness or suffering in the all-encompassing moment; dying is recollecting and releasing the past, in the present. Maia’s blue eyes are dazzling, her gender fluid with a boy haircut, vintage jeans, tee-shirt, and Converse sneakers. She never wears makeup.

She holds my head. “Breathe deeply…. Release,” she whispers. I lie fully clothed (only my sneakers are removed) under a wool blanket on a massage cot with clean white sheets. Immediately, I dissolve into eternity as an all-knowing particle in a vast black sky. “Surrender now or you never will,” I hear it or know it. Maia didn’t say it. I’m weightless, invisible as I float near a planet with a sun shining only on its edges. “Where are her hands?” I panic. My breathing quickens. Her imprint is hot on the pit of my stomach, yet she’s holds my feet. “Where is she now?” I panic once again. “Let go, Let God.” I know it or maybe I hear it. Now I look up at a black/blue sky with no stars.

I return three weeks later overwrought with energy and confess my fear of having another treatment: I can’t stop, reading, walking, writing, and talking. My epiphany of letting go of unrequited love for the man I once loved -- the same man with the stern face I saw in my first session -- gives me peace. “It also gives you energy,” Maia says. “When you let go, you make room to feel more alive.” My second epiphany is about the image of the tree that haunts me and that Maia says I should hold for now. “But I was the tree,” I say. “I was all trunk and roots (mind), no leaves or branches (feelings) – I was all earth and no heaven.”

This time, I lie on the cot as before, under the blanket with only my sneakers removed. I breathe deeply, but I don’t disappear into the cosmos like the first time. Instead, my focus is on the sound of waves and I wonder if the same sounds played during my first session. There are faces, some I know, some I don’t. Maia’s touch is not as hot or searing. When the session is over I think it's a total bust. But Maia saw leaves brushing against my cheek, healing me. Then I was a child dancing breathlessly in a circle of Native Americans. When I stood by the oak, tomahawk in hand, I screamed out wrongs done to me to a community of those same Natives. 

Her visions give me goose bumps: I spent the fall collecting leaves in my daily walk as a way of practicing being present, by bringing them home and enjoying them before crunching them up and throwing them away the next morning. And I never told Maia my mother is Native Caribbean, and that for several months I’ve revisited the hurt of my childhood, writing down the violence, cursing, and fighting as a way of letting it go. Then I danced in my apartment-- for joy. 

After the session she recommends I rest, but I’m not tired. That night, I go drinking with a friend but have nothing to say. Three hundred pounds of sleep fall over me, and I sleep for the next three days. 

The last session. I know now why I was never present. When I was a child I had to be vigilant to survive the violence. When I grew up and no longer felt threatened, I chose other distractions: held onto the past with unrequited love, dismissed the present with neuroses about my body image, and yearned for the future with a belief the grass was greener someplace else. 

This time when Maia touches my head, I don’t recognize the images. I see, though, two lovely white wolves playing in the snow and a beautiful Somali woman with twin babies wrapped in a blanket. But Maia sees a tree; its leaves are my history, stories, secrets, traits. I am the tree, the tree is God. I am stunned; the image of the tree still haunts me:

I go home and draw a tree like Maia said I should, filling the leaves with my stories, secrets, confusion, nightmares, joy, anger, ambitions.… Then I rip up my drawing, say goodbye to the past and hello to the beautiful twilight sky with a dark pink horizon  outside my bedroom window. Read my exciting memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at: https://www.amazon.com/Continent-Ruby-Memoir-Because-sometimes-ebook/dp/B00TT5DDWO?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0