How I love

Apotheca, from the Latin, meaning a repository. A storehouse or warehouse.

The acupuncturist was tall and stern, but beautiful. In heels. She reminded me of Edna Mode – the fastidious No capes! superhero costume designer in The Incredibles. Severe. A perfectly symmetrical black bob outlining her wondrous face. Her accent unapologetic, her eyes searing into me as she asked where the pain was and how long I had felt it and what made it happen. I felt hopelessly inadequate as I asked for her magic.

She made me lay down unceremoniously.

Leave your clothes on, she barked.

I heard the ripping peel of paper and within seconds felt the plunge of the needles into my nerves. I reacted so violently that my limbs shot up involuntarily. I started laughing.

I’m sorry. This is my first time. I didn’t know what to expect. Is it meant to hurt?

Yes.

When she was finished with me she left me there, laying on the bench – it wasn’t really a bed – and as she turned on her heel she said, I’ll be back in forty, fifty minutes. Her accent relentlessly refusing to relinquish itself.

Excuse me, I said, my mind racing in terror. How long? Surely she had said ‘fourteen or fifteen minutes’. I was in the agony of a million tiny, bodily transgressions.

Forty or fifty. Almost an hour. The magic, it has to work.

I heard her giggling later in the room next door, with the young girl who was silently packing herbs and other mysteries into a huge apothecary cabinet when I first walked in. They spoke in a language more beautiful than her medicinal English. Perhaps because of the laughter laced through it.

This is how I love. Like the silent girl, with a giggle under her belt. Packing my lovers into tiny little drawers. Filling those drawers full of memories. The kiss of this one. The sadness of that one. The day we met. The day we parted. The long nights swept into dawn with drinks and food and conversation and sex. The mornings, just breaking before we fall back into each other, heads on chests or hips or laps in the afterglow.

This is how I love. Filling individual containers with mysteries and marvels. Unique. A tiny, life-filled label to identify each one. Sometimes I open a drawer and let my hands tumble through the contents, allowing the sifted wonders to fall and remind me. Some I shut tight and never open them again, the contents too potent to touch.

Yet.

And then some days I softly tap to feel the hollow echoes of the ones still empty, wondering what medicinal miracles will eventually fill them to the brim. Wondering how long I will be able to dip into them before I have to close them up and look for the next remedy, the next adventure.

I knock and wait for the echo as I anticipate the magic.