...

It's occured to me over the past week that we largely do write our histories upon our bodies. My ligaments and tendons, joints and muscles and veins are all part of an organic filing system to which I've lost the key. I feel naked when someone's hands are upon me- I wonder which paragraphs stand out- oh no, don't go over there, I haven't tidied in that cupboard for ages.

Bodywork, this week, has reduced me to being a passive vessel. Floods of words swirl up, up from my neck, hips, heart; they eddy in my head and stream past my partially opened lips in such a heady torrent that not a single one of them escape. And so they stay locked inside, brewing. A strange dark bitter tea.

There *are* things physically wrong. They can be felt, physical manifestations. But I'm lost in a welter of doubt because manipulation, touch- they bring up memories and associations and grief and sadness. And I don't know what to do with them. I don't want to talk about it. I don't feel like bringing up ancient history to my friends again- I feel like a broken record, stuck on the same haunting groove. Boring, repetitive. Isn't there something in the present I can dwell on, instead of the same old history?

And I wonder. I wonder what would happen if peoples bodies, their mutable archive, were *not* an incomprehensible map to my fingers. What vast stores of knowledge I could read at my leisure with a touch. I wonder if learning bodywork would not, in fact, be rather like giving me the rotor settings to your enigma.