Ketamine Massage
art by Nora Kelly
A strange thing to do is snort a line of K at noon on a Thursday—middle of the workday—put your phone on silent and receive a “ketamine massage” from your Estonian friend who is staying with you for the week. You wonder if it’s a bad idea—will your husband be mad? Will you still be fucked up when it’s time to pick your daughter up from daycare? But it isn’t a bad idea. Your body relaxes, your mind opens up, you disassociate in a way you’ve been meaning to do for a while. You’re supposed to set an intention, something you want to take with you on this journey, kind of like in a yoga class. And that shouldn’t be too hard, considering the way things have been going.
It tracks, really. This entire winter has been strange. Five days before Christmas, your close friend went into hospice after the cancer had finally become too determined. Two days before Christmas he left this world completely. You sent presents to his kids, you donated to the GoFundMe, you made it up for the celebration of life. Nothing felt anywhere near enough. His brother-in-law said that his dying wish was for people to dance at his funeral, which was difficult and unnatural. He got on the mic, yelled at everyone, “Are you really not going to respect the man’s last dying wish!? He had one wish! Dance, motherfuckers!” You tried, and it was hard, but much later in the night you all found yourselves in a crowd, some cover band on stage, finally dancing as wildly as he wanted you to. You all felt him, and you felt free. You wouldn’t continue to, of course—this didn’t mean the grief was over—it was still just beginning. This didn’t mean you wouldn’t wake up in the morning with swollen eyes, hearts that were still in tatters, deeper sadness maybe than you’d ever had before, after being in a crowd of his friends and family that didn’t have him in it. But in that crowd, on that dance floor, you all lifted his wife into the air to crowd surf. The song was “Sugar We’re Goin’ Down” of all things. You held her up, she laid across everyone’s hands, laid back, closed her eyes, stretched her arms wide, and you made her weightless, made her float. He was there, too, you thought, somehow keeping her afloat.
A few weeks later, there was heavy snow in Georgia, heavy like it used to be growing up in New England. You basked in it, loved it, took pictures of it, went sledding, built the snowmen, did the whole thing, and then the power went out and you all nearly froze to death. And it didn’t get warmer, not really, not soon enough. Some days it didn’t even reach freezing. The wild animals started to lose their minds, and a raccoon found a way into your chicken coop one night, and then back in the next night. The rooster and the drake were the only survivors. One of the hens wasn’t quite dead, writhing and twisting, and you couldn’t let her suffer; you had to break her neck. It didn’t really work at first—she even managed to get away, with what sliver of life she had left, until you caught her again and finished it, practically ripping her head off to put her out of her misery. Your gardening gloves are still stained with blood. Somehow the ground wasn’t frozen, and you were able to dig the graves. One on Monday, one on Tuesday. Shallow, mass graves. The animals came back and dug them up.
The grief was different than with the loss of your friend. You went through the stages more cleanly, two days for each one. You looked them up afterward, the stages of grief, and you were shocked at how seamlessly you’d moved from one to the next, just as you were supposed to. But with the first loss of the winter, the stages were all over the place, coming and going and coming again, all at once sometimes, punctuated by sporadic tears. It’s still sporadic tears, just these massive outbursts of sorrow—oh my god this really happened—the sudden remembrance that a close friend has left this world completely, that two little boys lost their father, that a wonderful woman lost her husband, that a beautiful life has been snuffed out—that someone great is gone. (They wanted you to dance to that song at that person’s funeral? “Someone Great Is Gone”? You’d already been crying in the car to that song for weeks, long before he even died.)
He pops into your head once during the ketamine massage. Thoughts flutter in and out, some you want to hold onto, like creative inspiration that suddenly bursts forth with wings outstretched then soars off to another corner, behind a tree or a cloud, while something else works its way forward. He pops into your head—oh my god he’s really gone—and so do the chickens, their cold, still bodies, the lumps of them inside the coop, a pile of beautiful animals, little splatters of blood. The waterer you’d placed in the coop the night before was frozen solid, no body heat left to keep it from freezing, and that particular waterer stayed frozen for days, even when you’d taken it out and set it in the winter sun. Either it was just too cold out, or the coldness of what happened was permanent, like maybe the ice would never melt. Maybe none of this ice will ever melt.
You know you’re going to get more chickens. You’ll start a new flock, it’ll be great again one day. But you can’t yet speak for that other gaping hole, the winter wind blowing through constantly, the edges gathering freezing crystals, the whistling getting louder, louder—
You don’t want these things in your head during the ketamine massage, and luckily the drug is such that the thoughts do flicker in and out, making space for whatever else needs to show itself to you. You were supposed to have set an intention before the massage, something you want to take with you on this journey, something you hope to leave with. You can’t really think of anything except for please, fuck, let me be okay and make it through this winter. Then, during the massage, during the trip, or whatever you call it—it comes to you, the intention. You figure out what the intention needs to be. This was it, this is what your intention should be, and this—this! You’ve already achieved it, you are currently achieving it right now, you are doing it! It’s working, the whole thing is working!
But by the time it’s over, it flutters away again. You forgot what the intention was.
