âIâve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what youâd look like on my table. Letâs start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they donât have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. Thatâs how it works. And thatâs very appealing too. Woman have cellulite. All of them. Itâs dimply and cute. Itâs not a defect. Itâs not a health problem. Itâs the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say â what, this is it? Theyâre kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because itâs unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or theyâll yelp. Adults sag. It doesnât matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I donât know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as youâre all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right? Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that âI can stop hanging on now, Iâm safeâ â a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and weâre easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: Iâm in it for the glow. Iâll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.â
â What People Really Look Like
I love this man so much. In his about me, he writes: âI know most of the constellations visible in the Northern Hemisphere, but not all of them. I stopped because I thought it was a bad idea to have a name for everything in the sky.â
