Malu: peace, calm, shelter, protection.

I did not know that when I walked in. I just knew I needed to sit down somewhere that wasn’t a gate chair or a bar stool.

I had been in the airport lounge, which sounds civilized until you are sober and find yourself lined up bar stool after bar stool watching red and white wines get endlessly refilled. I have been sober since November 2024 and am damn happy about it, but watching is not a pastime I have time for anymore. It is, honestly, just boring. So I threw myself out the door to take in people, places, and stories. Much more interesting.

The Chiroport at MSP Concourse F appeared in the middle of the terminal like something that had no business being there, a quiet room tucked between fast food outposts that assault every nostril in a fifty-foot radius. Minneapolis St. Paul is a generous, unhurried airport, the kind that still has room for things like this. The “chiro” part I talked myself out of, but the massage chair called and I answered.

Malu welcomed me immediately for a twenty-minute session. I am no stranger to this kind of work and have needed it more as the years pile up and the mileage accumulates. After the usual questions I looked into her eyes. I do this with every therapist I have met. You get good at spotting the unicorns. The ones who are both receivers and transmitters, who know how to tune into your body, your ligaments, your energies, and your blocks, knots, and the deeply stored worry that has been living in you without permission. I looked and hoped and said, simply: “Please make it better.”

And she did.

Somewhere in the first few minutes the fast food smells stopped existing. I was aware of nothing except what her hands were finding. Long leans on my back, slow and deliberate, easing things back to where they were meant to be. And as they relaxed, the ever-sought pop pop pop of regions I have no names for, releasing, signaling that something is finally letting go.

Then she asked if I could unzip the front of my jumpsuit so she could really get into my back. Of course I said yes. What followed in those remaining minutes was the kind of work I did not know I had been missing. She reached into my armpits, which sounds absurd until you understand that thirty years of work stress apparently decided to homestead there, and no one had ever had the courage or the intuition to go looking. She found it all and she freed it.

I don’t fully understand all the vagus nerve content that floods the algorithms these days, but I can now testify to what it feels like when a professional spends twenty minutes waking yours back up. She sputtered them to life like a rusty old lawnmower that has been sitting in the garage. It took a few pulls of the handle. Hell, when it roared back to life, there are no words for what moved through me. Just trust that something moved.

When she finished I stood up several inches taller, my eyeballs somewhere in the back of my head, face arranged in an expression my husband would recognize immediately. We have a cat. His most transcendent state, achieved only with the good fish pate, is what we call “anchovy drunk.” That was me.

I could not wait to hug her, which I did, and then looked down and remembered I needed to zip my jumpsuit first. She laughed. I laughed. She took a photo of me in the chair before I stood up, the busy terminal stretched out behind me, Jimmy John’s sign glowing in the background like an accidental monument to contrast.

Those twenty minutes revved up everything that the week had ground down. For that I owed Malu’s hands some words.

I looked up her name afterward. It comes from a few cultures, though she told me she is Ethiopian. It means peace, calm, shelter, protection.

Of course it does.

I’ll be back.

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Originally published in Camera Dark Notes.