Katrin with Love

I. Intake

I found him the way women always seem to find men like him through a friend of a friend, a whispered recommendation passed across a kitchen table like contraband.

He’s different, she said, stirring her tea. He won’t make it weird. He’s actually good.

I didn’t ask what weird meant. I knew. Every woman who’s gone looking for help with her body knows the catalog of weird: the breath coach who lingers too long on your sternum, the bodyworker who narrates your hips like he’s auditioning for a porno, the retreat leader who calls his erection a teaching.

I had seen them all. I had paid them all. And I had walked out of every session feeling more locked-down than when I walked in, my body curling around itself like a fist.

So when I called the number she gave me, I had my armor on. My voice was clipped and professional. I told him I wanted to work on somatic integration. I used the right words. I did not say I have not been touched in two years and I am afraid I am forgetting how.

He let a small silence sit on the line. Then he said, “Okay. What’s your name?”

“Iris.”

“Iris. I’m Daniel. Why don’t you come by Thursday at four, and we’ll talk first. No work the first time. Just talk.”

That was the first thing he did right. He didn’t try to sell me on anything. He didn’t tell me what he was going to unlock in me. He just offered me a chair and a Thursday.

I should have known then. The careful ones are always the most dangerous.

His studio was on the second floor of an old craftsman in a neighborhood I didn’t know well, the kind of place that still had lemon trees in the front yards and wind chimes nobody had taken down in twenty years. I climbed the outdoor staircase and stood on the landing, palm flat against the door, breathing the way I had taught myself to breathe before job interviews. In for four, hold for four, out for eight. My nervous system, beloved liar, agreed to lie still.

He opened the door before I knocked.

The first thing I noticed was that he wasn’t beautiful. Not in the way I had braced for. The men in this work were always too beautiful, with their long hair and their soft eyes and their voices like steamed milk. Daniel had a face you had to look at twice high forehead, a nose that had been broken at least once, gray in his beard that he hadn’t bothered to dye. He was maybe forty-five. He wore linen pants and a t-shirt and no shoes, and he looked at me like I was a person, not a project.

“Come in,” he said. “Tea?”

The studio was one large room with hardwood floors the color of honey and a wall of windows facing a magnolia tree. There was a low couch, a futon mattress made up with white cotton, a small altar with no statues on it, just a bowl of water and a stone. No incense. No crystals. No tibetan singing bowls arranged like a sales pitch.

I felt my shoulders drop a half-inch and resented him for it.

We sat on the couch with our tea. He asked me what I was looking for, and I gave him the speech I had rehearsed in the car. Somatic integration. Working with trauma stored in the pelvis. A history of dissociation during intimacy. I used clinical language because clinical language is a kind of clothing.

He listened. He did not nod sympathetically or make any of the sounds bodyworkers make when they want you to know they are holding space for you.

When I was finished, he said, “Okay. And what do you actually want?”

I stared at him.

“I gave you the answer.”

“You gave me a resume,” he said. “I’m asking what you want.”

I felt something behind my sternum go very still. Like an animal hearing a branch break.

“I want to feel something,” I said. “Without leaving.”

He nodded once, slowly. “Okay. We can work with that.”

II. First Session

The agreement was simple. Clothes on or off, my choice, but most clients started clothed. He would not touch me anywhere I had not given specific consent to be touched. I could stop at any point with a single word. He suggested red because no gets complicated for women who have been trained, and I almost laughed at the precision of it, the way he named the exact mechanism by which my consent had been disassembled for years.

The first session, I kept my clothes on. A loose linen dress, no bra, underwear I had picked deliberately for being unsexy. He had me lie on the futon on my back, and he sat cross-legged near my head, just outside the perimeter of my body.

“We’re going to breathe together for a while,” he said. “I’m not going to touch you today. I want you to get used to me being here.”

“Stop performing,” he said quietly. “I can hear you trying.”

My eyes flew open. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the magnolia.

“How did you”

“Just breathe however you breathe. Even if it’s shallow. Even if it’s bad. I’m not grading you.”

So I breathed badly. I breathed like a woman who had been holding her diaphragm hostage for a decade. I breathed like someone trying to take up as little space as possible inside her own ribs. And he sat next to me, and he did not fix me, and he did not narrate me, and slowly over twenty minutes, thirty, I lost track my breath began to deepen on its own. Not because I made it. Because I forgot to stop it.

When I started crying, I was surprised. I had not been thinking of anything sad. I had not been thinking of anything at all.

“There it is,” he said. Soft. Not triumphant. Just acknowledging, the way you might acknowledge a cat that had finally come out from under the bed.

I cried for a long time. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t hand me a tissue. He just sat there and breathed, and at some point I realized that his breathing had become a kind of holding that I was being held by something that was not his hands, and that this was, perhaps, the first time in my adult life I had been held without also being negotiated with.

When I sat up, my face was a mess. He handed me a glass of water.

“Same time next week?” he said.

I nodded. I could not speak yet.

In the car, I sat with my hands on the steering wheel for ten minutes before I could drive. I was furious with him, and I did not yet know why.

III. Second Session

I came back angry.

I had spent the week in a strange weather of agitation, snapping at my coworkers, crying in the produce aisle over the avocados. My therapist would have called it thawing. I called it being thirty-four years old and out of my fucking mind.

When I walked in, he saw it on me immediately.

“Tell me,” he said.

“This is bullshit,” I said. I sat down on the couch with my arms crossed. “I don’t know what you did, but I have been a wreck all week.”

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “You did.”

“That’s the kind of thing people say when they want to take credit and avoid responsibility at the same time.”

He laughed. He actually laughed short, surprised, like I had caught him off guard. And something in his face when he laughed made my stomach turn over, and I noticed it, and I filed it away in the cabinet labeled Not Now.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. Let me say it differently. Your body started moving something. It’s going to keep moving for a while. That’s not pleasant. It’s also not bad. Do you want to keep going, or do you want to stop?”

“I want to keep going,” I said. The words came out before I had decided them. I felt my jaw tighten.

“Okay. Today I’d like to put a hand on your belly while you breathe. Over your clothes. Just one hand. You can say no.”

“Why my belly?”

“Because it’s where you live, and you’ve moved out.”

I stared at him. He stared back. He was not flirting with me. He was not doing the thing. He was just looking at me like I was a country he had visited once and wanted to remember accurately.

“Okay,” I said.

I lay down. He moved to sit beside me, on the floor, level with my hip. He placed one warm palm flat on the soft place below my navel, over the linen, and the heat of his hand came through the fabric like a question.

“Breathe into my hand,” he said.

I did. The first breath was a betrayal my belly didn’t want to rise. It wanted to stay flat, hidden, the apologetic belly of a woman who had been told her stomach was a problem since she was eleven.

But the second breath came easier. By the fifth, my belly was lifting his hand. By the tenth, I was crying again, quietly, with my eyes closed, and I felt something I had not felt in so long I had forgotten the word for it.

He kept his hand there for a long time. He did not move it up. He did not move it down. He did not stroke. He did not press. He just rested it on my belly like a stone on a piece of paper that would otherwise blow away.

When the hour was over, he lifted his hand and sat back. I opened my eyes.

“Thank you,” I said. My voice was hoarse.

“Thank you,” he said back. And he meant it, somehow, in a way I did not understand.

IV. Third Session

I am going to skip ahead a little, because the middle of any practice is the part nobody wants to read about. The repetitions. The slow expansion. The hand on the belly becoming a hand on the sternum becoming, weeks later, a hand on the inner thigh through the linen, and the breath that did not flinch. The discovery that I could be touched and stay.

That I could close my eyes and feel pleasure rise through my body like weather and not have to leave the room to survive it.

What I want to tell you about is the third session, which was the one where I knew.

It was a Thursday in October. I had taken off my dress for the first time. I was lying on the futon in my underwear, and Daniel had asked permission to place both hands on my ribs one on the front, one on the back and breathe with me. Sandwich breathing, he called it, with no irony. I had laughed. He had grinned. The grin had done something to my chest that had nothing to do with somatic integration.

His hands were warm. His palm was on my sternum, between my breasts but not touching them, and his other hand was flat against my upper back, and I felt my breath move between his hands like water finding the shape of a vessel. I had stopped performing weeks ago. I was just there, in my body, breathing, and his hands were the temperature of my own skin and I could not tell, for a moment, where I ended and he began.

And then this is the part I have rehearsed telling and never told anyone I opened my eyes.

He was looking at me.

He was not looking at me clinically. He was not looking at me the way a coach looks at a client. He was looking at me the way a man looks at a woman whose ribs he is cradling in his hands, and in his face I saw something he had not meant for me to see: a brief, unguarded tenderness, a softening at the eyes and the mouth that he corrected within a second, professionalism returning to his features like a curtain dropping.

But I had seen it.

And he knew I had seen it.

For one breath, neither of us moved. His hands stayed exactly where they were. I felt my heart against his palm. I felt, beneath the calm of the room, a single thread of something tightening between his body and mine, and I felt him feel it too, and the rest of the session passed in a silence that was no longer the silence of practice but the silence of two people pretending not to have noticed something.

When I sat up, I could not look at him. I dressed quickly. I muttered something about traffic. I left without booking the next session.

In the car, I sat with my hands shaking on the steering wheel and I said out loud, to no one, oh no.

V. The Letter

I did not come back for three weeks.

In those three weeks I did all the things a woman does when she is trying to outrun the recognition of her own desire. I dated a man from an app who took me to a restaurant where the lighting was too bright. I went to a yoga class and cried in pigeon pose. I texted my friend who had referred me and asked, very casually, if she had ever, you know, with him, and she said Iris. Just my name, like that, with a question mark hanging off the end of it. I did not answer.

I wrote:

Daniel, I have not come back because I am afraid. I think you know why. I am writing to tell you that I know it is unprofessional to feel what I am feeling and I am not asking you to do anything about it. I am writing because the practice has taught me to name what is true, and the truest thing I can say right now is that I have fallen for you, and I do not know what to do with it, and I miss the work, and I am scared to come back, and I am also scared not to. You do not have to respond. You can tell me I should find someone else. I will understand.

— Iris.

I put it in his mailbox at the bottom of the stairs and walked away too quickly, like a teenager.

He called me that night. I let it go to voicemail because I was too afraid to answer. His message was short.

Iris. Thank you for the letter. It took courage. I’d like to talk in person, not on the phone. Can you come Thursday at four? Not for a session. Just to talk.

I went.

VI. The Conversation

We sat on the couch with the tea between us. I could not drink mine. My hands were doing the thing they do when they don’t know where to be.

“I want to say a few things,” he said. “Will you let me say them before you say anything?”

I nodded.

“First. What you wrote took more honesty than most people manage in their whole lives. I’m grateful for it. Second. I am not going to pretend with you, because pretending would dishonor the work we’ve done. So I’ll tell you the truth, which is that I have felt it too. I felt it the day you came in, actually. Not as a thought. As a recognition. And I have been managing it the way I am trained to manage it, which is by being very, very careful with you, and by never letting it into the room. I think I succeeded until that session in October. I think I let something slip. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry”

“Let me finish. The third thing is the hard thing. I cannot be your coach and your lover. I want to be very clear about that, not because I am following a rule, but because I have seen what happens to women who fall in love with the men who taught them how to feel safe in their bodies. I have seen them lose themselves. I have seen the work poisoned, retroactively, by what came after. I am not willing to do that to you.”

I felt the floor tilt slightly. I had not realized, until that moment, that I had been hoping for a different speech.

“So that’s a no,” I said. My voice was very small.

“That’s a no to that,” he said. “That is not a no to you.”

I looked up.

“What does that mean.”

He took a long breath. He looked, for the first time since I had met him, uncertain.

“It means that if you want to keep working with me, we can keep working, and I will hold the line, because that is my job. Or and this is the harder option we can end the work. I can refer you to someone excellent. And in six months, if you still want to, you can call me. Not as a client. As a person. And we can see what’s there.”

“Six months.”

“Six months.”

“Why six months?”

“Because that’s how long it takes for the transference to settle. Because right now you do not entirely know whether you love me or whether you love the version of yourself I have helped you remember. And I do not want to find that out by hurting you.”

I started crying. Not the open-throated crying of the sessions. A different crying. The crying of being respected so thoroughly that it felt almost violent.

“That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” I said. “And I hate you for it.”

He laughed. He laughed and his eyes were wet and he reached for my hand and then stopped, his hand suspended in the air between us, and he set it back on his own knee with great care.

“I’ll wait,” he said. “If you want to find out, I’ll wait.”

VII. After

I ended the work. He gave me three referrals; I chose a woman in her sixties with gray hair to her waist and a laugh like a door slamming. The work continued. It was different. It was good.

I marked the date on my calendar.

For six months I lived a life. I wrote. I started dating, gently, with the new nervous system I had grown. I learned that I could be desired without dissolving, that I could want without losing the thread back to myself. I thought about Daniel less than I expected to and more than I admitted. Sometimes I would be in the produce aisle and remember his hand on my belly and feel a small heat rise through me, and I would let it rise, and let it pass, the way he had taught me to let things pass.

He picked up on the second ring.

“Iris.”

“Daniel.”

There was a long pause. I could hear him smiling. You can hear it, when someone is smiling, if you have learned how to listen.

“How are you,” he said.

“I’m myself,” I said. “All the way.”

“I can hear it.”

“Are you free tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Pick somewhere with good lighting.”

“Okay.”

I hung up. I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone in my lap and I breathed, the slow breath I had learned in his studio, and I felt my belly rise against the band of my jeans, and I felt my whole body every inch of it, all the way down into the parts of me that had taken so long to come back say yes.

Whatever happened next, I would be there for it. All of me. In the room.

That was the thing he had given me, before he had given me anything else. That was the thing I would be bringing to dinner.

VIII. Dinner

He picked a small Italian place with candles on every table and a back patio strung with bulbs. Good lighting, as requested warm and forgiving but not dim enough to hide in. He was already there when I arrived, standing up from the table when he saw me, and the thing that struck me first was that he was nervous. Daniel, who had held my ribs in his hands while I wept, was nervous. The discovery undid me a little.

He had cut his hair. Not short, just neater. He was wearing a button-down the color of wet slate, sleeves rolled to the forearm, and I had never seen him in anything but linen and bare feet. The shift from practitioner to man on a date was so vertiginous I had to put my hand on the back of the chair before I sat down.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

We looked at each other. Neither of us picked up the menu.

“This is so strange,” I said.

“It’s so strange.”

“Are we supposed to make small talk now? Tell each other about our childhoods?”

“I think we earned the right to skip that part.”

I laughed. The waiter came. We ordered without really looking. When he left, Daniel reached across the table and put his hand palm-up between us, an offering, and I placed my hand in his, and the first skin-to-skin contact we had ever had outside of a session went through me like a struck bell. He felt it. I watched it move across his face the small inhale, the slight widening at the eyes and I realized he had been managing his own body for as long as I had been managing mine.

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

“Okay.”

“I have not slept with anyone in two years. Not because of you. Because of the work, mostly. The discipline of it. I tell you this because I want you to know that whatever happens tonight, it is not going to be casual for me. I am not capable of casual right now.”

I felt my throat go tight.

“I haven’t either,” I said. “Two and a half. I’m not capable of casual either. I’m not sure I ever was.”

He squeezed my hand once and let it go.

We ate. We talked about real things like his daughter, who was in college in Oregon; my mother, who had died the year before I found him; the book he was writing that he would probably never finish. He told me he had thought about me on a Tuesday in March and had to leave his own studio and walk around the block. I told him I had cried in pigeon pose. He told me he was glad I had cried in pigeon pose. The whole dinner was a kind of breathing — back and forth, in and out — and by the time the check came I knew, with the same quiet certainty I had felt on his couch the first day, what I wanted.

“Come home with me,” I said.

“Yes.”

IX. Threshold

My apartment was clean. I had cleaned it that morning the way women clean before everything that matters, with the kind of attention that is really a prayer. I had put fresh sheets on the bed. I had not lit candles, because I did not want to perform a seduction. I had left a single lamp on in the corner, and the bedroom door open, and that was all.

He stepped inside and stood very still in my entryway. He looked at my books. He looked at the plant on the windowsill that I had been keeping alive for three years. He looked at me, and he said, “Show me your home before you show me anything else.”

So I walked him through it. The kitchen with the chipped tile I loved. The desk by the window where I wrote. The bathroom with the little blue tile someone had hand-painted before I bought the place. He listened to me name my own rooms, and I understood that he was doing the thing he had taught me moving slowly, letting my nervous system catch up, letting the body know where it was before asking the body to do anything.

By the time we got to the bedroom door, I was not afraid. I was ready, which is a different country.

We stood at the foot of the bed. He took my face in both of his hands the first time he had ever touched my face and he looked at me for a long moment without kissing me. I felt myself want to rush forward, want to perform, want to skip ahead to the part where I would know how this was going to go.

“Stay here,” he said softly. “With me. Don’t go anywhere.”

I breathed. I let my eyes stay open. I let myself be looked at.

And then he kissed me.

The kiss was not a movie kiss. It was a slow, full, mouth-on-mouth kiss that lasted a long time, and somewhere in the middle of it I felt my belly soften actually soften, the way it had softened under his hand the second session and I made a small sound against his mouth that was not performance. It came up from somewhere I had not known was still working.

“There you are,” he murmured against my lips. “There you are.”

X. Undressing

He undressed me the way he had taught me to breathe. Slowly. With permission. With pauses.

He unbuttoned the top button of my dress and stopped. Looked at me. Waited until I nodded. The second button pause, look, nod. By the fourth button, I was laughing, half from nerves and half from the absurd tenderness of it, and he was smiling against my collarbone, and I said, “Daniel, I consent, I consent to all of it,” and he said, “I know. I’m doing it anyway.”

When my dress fell off my shoulders and pooled on the floor, I stood in front of him in nothing but my underwear, and my old reflexes tried to find their footing the hand wanting to cover the belly, the breath wanting to shorten, the eyes wanting to look at the ceiling. I noticed each one. I let each one pass. I stayed.

He looked at me. Just looked. Not at parts of me at me, the whole of me, the way you might look at a stretch of coastline you had been driving toward for years.

“You are so beautiful,” he said. His voice was rough. “I’m going to tell you that as many times as I need to until you can hear it.”

“Try me,” I said.

“You are so beautiful.”

“Again.”

“You are so beautiful, Iris.”

The third time, I felt it land. I felt it land in the place under my ribs that had been refusing such sentences for most of my adult life.

I felt my eyes fill, and I did not look away, and he did not look away, and we stood there in my dim bedroom with my dress on the floor and we did not move until I was ready to move.

I reached for the hem of his shirt. He let me undress him. I took my time the way he had taken his. Button. Pause. Button. Pause. When his chest was bare I put my palm flat against his sternum, the way he had put his palm flat against my belly so many months ago, and I felt his heart pounding under my hand, and I understood that he was not a teacher in this room. He was a person, with a body that had also been waiting.

“Lie down with me,” I said.

XI. The Bed

I will tell you what happened, because you asked, and because I think it matters that someone tell the truth about what sex can be when it is allowed to be slow.

We lay on our sides facing each other for a long time before anything else. Just that. Skin to skin, his hand on my hip, my hand on his ribs, breathing the way we had breathed in his studio. The same breath. The same room inside my body. Only now the air between us was charged with the thing we had not let into the room before, and every breath drew it deeper into us both.

His mouth moved to my neck. His hand moved to the small of my back and pulled me toward him, and I felt him hard against my hip through the thin cotton of his pants, and I did not flinch. I did not leave. I stayed in the heat that rose from my own pelvis to meet him. I had not known I could meet someone like that. I had spent my whole sexual life arriving at the appointed time and finding the room empty.

When he moved his mouth down my body, he did it the way he had once moved his hand sternum, then ribs, then the soft place below the navel that he had taught me to breathe into. He kissed it. He rested his forehead there for a moment, as if greeting an old friend, and I laughed and cried at the same time, a sound I had never made before in a bed.

“Hi, belly,” he said quietly, against my skin. “I’ve missed you.”

I came apart, then. Not in orgasm. In something deeper. I felt my whole body unclench in a way it had been refusing to unclench since I was a child, and I sobbed once, hard, and he came back up to my face and held me through it, his hand on the back of my head, my tears on his collarbone, his erection still there between us, patient, unembarrassed, part of the moment instead of demanding it.

“You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “We can stop right here. This is already enough.”

“I want you,” I said. “I want you, Daniel. I am not running from anything. I am moving toward something.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“Say that again,” he said.

“I am moving toward you.”

“Once more.”

“I am moving toward you. I am here. I am choosing.”

He kissed me then with something different in his mouth. Not hunger exactly. Recognition. The acknowledgment that I had crossed a country to get to this bed, and so had he, and that we were going to do this thing together as two adults who had both walked a long way.

XII. Inside

When he finally moved inside me, it was not a moment of conquest. It was a moment of meeting. He went slowly, watching my face, breathing with me, and I felt my body open around him not because I made it open but because I had spent a year learning how to stop closing. I had a thought, very clear, that this was the first time in my life I had been entered without leaving.

I stayed.

I stayed for the long slow rocking of his hips. I stayed when his forehead pressed to mine and our breaths braided together the way they used to braid in his studio. I stayed when pleasure began to build through my pelvis in a wave that was not the sharp brittle pleasure I had learned how to fake, but a thick warm tide that started in my feet and moved up through my legs and bloomed open at the base of my spine. I stayed when he whispered my name into my hair like he was setting it down somewhere safe.

I came with my eyes open, looking at him. I had never done that before. I had always closed my eyes at the end, because the end was the moment of greatest exposure and I had spent my life hiding at exactly that moment. This time I kept them open. I watched his face as my body broke open in long slow pulses around him, and I watched his face break open in answer, and the sound I made was not the sound I had been taught to make. It was a sound from underneath all of that. A sound my body had been keeping for me.

He came a few moments after, and I felt him shake, and I held him through it the way he had held me through all the other shakings, and when he was still again he did not roll away. He stayed inside me. He stayed on top of me, his weight on his forearms, his face against my neck, and I felt his breath slow against my collarbone and I felt my own breath rise to meet it.

We stayed like that for a long time. Joined. Not moving. Just breathing.

That was the whole lesson.

XIII. Morning

I woke at the gray hour before dawn. He was asleep on his stomach beside me, one arm flung across my waist, and his face in sleep was a face I had not yet seen — younger, unguarded, mouth slightly open. I lay still and looked at him and felt no panic. No urge to flee. No urge to check whether I had done something wrong, said something wrong, been something wrong. Just a wide quiet pleasure at the fact of him being here.

He stirred. Opened one eye.

“You’re awake,” he said.

“I’m awake.”

“How are you.”

I considered the question with the care it deserved. I scanned my body the way he had taught me to scan it. Belly, chest, throat, jaw, the soft animal of my pelvis. Nothing was clenched. Nothing was performing. Nothing was gone.

“I’m here,” I said. “All the way.”

He smiled into the pillow. His hand tightened around my waist.

“Good morning, Iris,” he said.

“Good morning, Daniel.”

Outside, the light was coming up over the lemon tree in my neighbor’s yard, and somewhere a mourning dove was doing its slow soft work, and I lay in my bed next to a man I had walked a long way to reach, and I understood that healing was not the destination. The bed was not the destination.

Staying was the destination, and I had arrived, and I would have to arrive again every day for the rest of my life, and that was the practice, and it would never end, and I was, for the first time, willing.

I closed my eyes.

I breathed.

I stayed.

– Where I Break Open (previously @whereibreakopen on Substack)