At the start of the year, when my insurance is plush and full, I like to try to go at least once a month. He’s a big man, and the first time it was intimidating, but he is aware of his own strength so that when I lie face down on the table I have the feeling of being a recalcitrant little piece of dough that is being smoothed out by hands that know their work well. He says the same thing every time, that I have a lot of tension around my shoulders, and I feel weirdly proud when he does, as though I have brought him a particularly thorny equation to solve, as though the equation is my body.

I read somewhere that we store memories in our bodies, and my ballet teacher said once that when we did a certain stretch we should not be surprised if we find ourselves sobbing. When I am on the table sometimes I feel them rising out of my flesh, like things that sunk at the bottom of a lake will do in time, full of their own bloat. Things. Bodies, obviously.

He has this little trick of leaning his whole weight down while using his forearm to slide across me, like he is slicing the dough even as he rolls it out. Or it is the movement of someone wiping grime off a glass pane.

This is what I saw through the pane today, when he did it.

There was a shoe repair store in our town that my father would sometimes take me to when I was a very small child; he knew the owner, they were from the same village maybe or next door villages which is basically the same thing. They would talk in dialect which if you don’t know it will perhaps make you think of mobsters or their brassy molls shouting across deli counters at each other, but it’s not like that at all. It’s the sussurations of doves. Before I remembered to forget how to speak it myself the words sat in the little fleshy pocket under my tongue, behind my teeth, melting like a caramel. In the memory they are murmuring like stones of a gravel path being raked and then suddenly the words are more like fat rain drops clattering around me and then someone breaks into english to say don’t touch that it’s not for eating. I freeze, my hand on one leaf of the tiny orange tree in the window. The oranges are not oranges but bergamot, all the way from Calabria, and this and the smell of leather is heavy in the air. Oranges that are not for eating but for looking at, it’s puzzling to me then but I understand it now. Miles away in time and space I remember how when the shop is demolished some six years ago now, my facebook feed is full of people talking about the bergamot.

This is how it is when he brings up the bodies; I am back in that memory and also looking at them from the shore, and I can ask the questions that I did not know how to ask, then. Or I can stand and just witness the exhumation. Today I watched the bergamot through the glass of the shoe repair shop, this time from the other side, through the window that was my back as the massage therapist (Paul) used his forearm to wipe away time and unknot my flesh and I asked myself what it was about men who know how to love what is beautiful — what it is that it does to me, I mean, especially when they are the kind that no one suspects of knowing how to love what is beautiful.

I don’t know and I love it.