Rose oil and arnica in all the open spaces

A writing exercise. A bit of magic. A spell. A dream. A massage.

I am traveling. Two weeks of precious time with my daughter, who lives on the west coast. When I visit here - or go to my sister in San Francisco - I try to keep to my New York schedule. I wake early and use the time to write.

While traveling, I’m playing with the exercises in Jeannine Ouellette’s Writing in The Dark, a miracle of a thing. If you are a writer, go see. This is my response to the THIRD EYE exercise from her The Visceral Self Intensive.

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At Day Lily, white cartons of Minor Figures Oat Milk are stacked on pine shelves. On each aseptic package, the company logo, a purple line drawing of a person with chin length hair, wearing sunglasses, avoids my eyes.

“What are you up to?” the barista asks, pouring espresso over ice.

Gold nose ring. Beautiful smile. So young. Since I arrived in Portland ten days ago, I’ve been surrounded by 30 year olds - musicians, actors, artists and so many small business starters. My niece, a therapist, counsels people in poly-amorous clusters. My daughter is homesteading the small, wild patch behind her apartment while making a (good) living re-selling vintage clothing.

“I'm visiting. I’m from New York. My daughter sleeps later than me,” I say. I can feel myself babbling and I stop short, cutting myself off before I blurt my life story. I am acutely awake and also, half asleep, which makes everything I see into a dream image. I am also, all week, acutely self-conscious. Out of place. Out of rhythm. I am joy-saturated with mother-daughter time. I am dreaming of waking back in my own bed, my own life: driving to Art Cafe, ordering a Picasso Salad.

The barista holds out my coffee with two hands. An apothecary passing a serum across the counter. The glass is cold, wet. The coffee too dark. More oat milk is added. A white cloud swirls in, caramel blooms inside of chocolate. “Thank you.”

I carry the elixir (with two hands) to my cafe table and set it on a cocktail napkin to soak up the condensation.

I am working on the gender awareness exercise my daughter gave to me when I told her I was in this writing class where, each day, I spend five minutes noticing details without mentioning myself. “I am learning to love a challenge. I am learning the power of restraint.”

“Ah,” she said. “Now try writing without gender. No man, woman. No pronouns.”

I try not to stare at people as I scan their bodies, their clothing. The first thing I notice is, without gender, everything is closer, more intimate.

Instead of, “a bearded man, all in black with some kind of harness,” this is a person whose right forearm is tattooed with morning glories. A person whose beard is the color of blackberries, with glints of copper.

Instead of “a young woman with two dogs,” I see a person, barely five feet tall, in a ballerina pink hoodie, holding the leashes of a mid-size Lab and a Husky puppy, both muzzled.

My coffee is still wrong so I get back in line where I see a dirty white glove dangling from a pocket like a weird hand. I see a white leather purse clutched against the rib cage like a treasure chest.

I ask for heavy cream but the barista tells me, “We’re vegan.”

“But you served me an egg and cheese sandwich. . . ”

“Yes but no,” the barista says. “Nothing is real here.”

The door opens. People enter in singles and pairs. Orange socks in scuffed Nikes. Both arms tattooed with sails.

On the shelf beside me, a plastic skeleton, painted in the colors of bad candy, sits atop a wooden box that reads: FUTURA. Together we bloom.

On the far wall, an enormous neon eye, bright pink, stares across the space. On the sound system, angels are singing. My Shazam app finds the songs for me: "Steeeam," "Side Effects," "Rip Tide".

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This reminds me that when I was walking to the cafe this morning, I was thinking (again) about that dream where the Great Hand pulled a second skeleton through the top of my head. I hadn’t known it was in me. In the dream, seeing it dangling from the Great Hand, gelatinous, necrotic, I wasn’t sure that I felt better.

This is the time of shedding all the things. Gender pronouns. Second skeletons. This is the time of speaking up, setting boundaries.

In another dream, which happened while I was having a massage, sand began sifting out of my body. It piled beneath the massage table, drifts and dunes as Charlene’s strong hands kneaded the muscles in my legs, my buttocks, the back of my heart. My mother appeared then and stood beside me, to the left of where I lay face down. “Goodbye,” she said. “Thank you for holding all of this sand.”

She took it from me then.
She called it to her then.
She pulled it from the cells of my body
into the black ceramic bowl that she held in her hands.

At the vegan cafe, there are four stools, painted the color of raspberry sorbet where no one ever sits. A good pop of color against the glossy square tiles below the bar. The tiles are ballet slipper pink (the color of my manicure).

Now that the sand is gone I am acutely aware of color.
Now that the sand is gone I am able to feel.
The first thing that returned was pleasure.

During the third massage, my father left, falling out of my body like Peter Pan’s shadow, like a piece of chiffon, sewn to my heels with Wendy thread. As he hit the floor he dissolved into smoke. By then, my ghost dad had descended from the ceiling. he sucked up the smoke, drawing it deep into his own belly.

I was awake. I was asleep. It really happened. I was dreaming. When you lift the guard rails, anything is possible. What matters is he came.

“I will take this from you,” he said. Then, he took me in his arms and I sobbed until Charlene turned me over to weave her tender fingers into the spaces between my toes, to rub my shins, my thighs, the front of my heart with scented oil, to stroke the tips of her fingers across my cheekbones and under my jaw. To smooth roses and arnica into the sockets of my eyes, the roots of my hair. To pull her hands from my body with a blessing. To turn off the music. To close the door as she left me resting, wrapped in warm white sheets in silence, in spaciousness, alone.