In the beginning was the word By Laura J. Oliver

Here’s what old people do. They talk about their aches and pains and what they had to eat at their most recent meal.

Grilled cheese, and my hip hurts. Ha ha.

I know you’re reviewing your last conversation with furrowed brow, so I’m trying to make you feel better.

To make myself feel better, I’m engaged in an experiment. I have a pain that only manifests when I lie down on my left side, but it’s really interfering with my lack of sleep. That’s another joke. Read it again.

An MRI has identified what could be the cause, but according to the pain management specialist, the source of my pain could be this, could be that. A spinal injection has helped a bit, but to avoid doing another, the doctor has suggested a month of acupuncture three times a week.

Acupuncture is not covered by my insurance, so I have been agonizing about what to do because the intense, accelerated schedule of appointments will, by necessity, be expensive, but I discover there is a practice called “community acupuncture,” which is very affordable because it is done en masse. Picture a South Korean wedding where 5,000 engaged couples gather in a stadium. Like that.

I walk in the first day and see 10 mesh lounge chairs of sorts, lined up five to a side in a moderately-sized, dimly-lit room. Almost every recliner has a person lying on it with needles in various places, I assume, but can’t verify because I don’t look as I make my way down the center aisle to an empty chair. One of the things I will come to learn is that privacy does not require the usual physical barriers. There are ephemeral, spiritual boundaries that make it feel as if every person is in a room of their own.

White sound from a fan and faint music masks any conversation between the acupuncturist and patient so you are barely aware when one person’s session is complete, their needles removed, and they silently slip from the room.

I roll up my pants to my knees, I’m barefoot in a sleeveless top, and I offer up my extremities to my practitioner. How can you do this? I whisper, curious. How can you minister to what hurts when you only have access to 40 percent of my body? And not the part that hurts? She just smiles and says, Because I’ve been doing this 18 years.

Okay.

I am quick to enter other people’s realities when they seem better than my own.

And success speaks for itself. No matter what time of day or what day of the week I go, the room is nearly full. People love coming here. And they skew young although I see middle-aged people as well, and as many men as women.

Not that I’m looking.

She puts the needles in my hands and feet and the top of my head and leaves me there to cook. Within a few minutes, I feel my body reject several of the needles. I swear I’m not moving—they just fly out and hit the floor. Is that a good thing, I wonder?

I gently place Air Pods in my ears to listen to music. But the music makes me weep and think of things to tell you that I can’t write down and won’t remember, then I can’t wipe away my tears because my hands are full of needles.

So. This is awkward

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a playlist prepared, and the selection I picked on Spotify changes genres and is suddenly too loud and not continuous. Now I feel like I’m trapped at a rock concert too close to the stage.

I take a cautious glance at the wall clock and inadvertently see that all the bodies around me look like we are in suspended animation for a journey to Mars. I’m waking up first.

That makes me remember the YouTube video of the Rhodesian Ridgeback in the kennel who figured out how to nose open the latch of his cage, then raced down the run setting all his delighted fellow inmates free.

The next time I come, I vow to just lie there and let go of my thoughts like my friend Ned does six hours a day, trying not to have to incarnate again. He is in a big hurry to be done with Earthly existence in a spiritual way. But every thought that might flit past my consciousness like a cloud (the analogy meditators all use), I chase, knock down and rope like a calf in a steer-roping contest. Gotcha! Then I spring up, get back on my pony, and mentally look around for the next thought to lasso coming out of the shoot.

Got one! I am failing acupuncture. I’m doomed to get another spinal injection…

But our brains are phenomenal expectation machines. False flattery affects us even when we know it is untrue. (Looking good, you!) And when part of an object or word is missing, our brains fill it in. And when given a placebo we believe is medicine, we get well. But even better, when given a placebo and TOLD it’s a placebo, we still get well!

The implications are so huge I get lost in them. So, I lie there wanting to heal my hip and my heart and in love with my acupuncture points. Yes, there is Mound of Ruins and Tears Container, but there is also Spirit Gate, Shining Sea, and Grasping the Wind.

I try a mantra. “I’m healing,” I tell myself and any spiritual beings that might want to make me not a liar. “I am healed,” I try—going for broke.

“Not just my hip, but everything in my life.” That’s possible, right? That healing is like love? Nonselective, boundaryless? Did you know there is an acupuncture point called Soul Door?

You can’t change your feelings until you change the words in your head. Say them now, because if you say them, in some small part of your brain, you’ll believe them.

I am healing, I am healing,

I am healed.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.