A single table stands in the center of the reiki master’s studio, an open palm waiting to receive me. Subtle scents of lavender and bergamot hover in the air as a flute plays. A whimsical statue of a meditating dog, sitting Buddha-like, watches as I clamber on the table.
I’m hoping that energy work may help to relieve my stress.
The master holds her hands above me, her palms fluttering like doves’ wings over the nest of my body. She sends healing to my chakras, the energy centers outlined in ancient texts. Passing over crown and third eye, she clears the way for my energy to flow through me like a purifying stream.
Then she pauses, her hands hovering like a hummingbird over the base of my throat. “Your throat chakra is closed,” she tells me. It is the chakra that allows me to speak my truth.
It is always blocked.
After she clears it, she tells me to say a series of affirmations to keep it open. Every day, alone in my car, I repeat them out loud, over the over, during my hour-long commute to work.
Affirmation: I am safe and trust others to allow me to express myself truthfully.
Barkley, my 50-pound black lab, cowers under the dining room table, retreating from the toe of my husband’s Nike that grazed his flank as the dog moved between us. The shoe punts the dog’s water dish instead, sending a stream across the hardwood.
Ed towers over me, teeth clenched. Spittle flies from the corner of his mouth, narrowly missing my face. I don’t flinch as his molten words pour over me. “God damn you: Take it back,” he demands, a petulant five-year-old in a six-foot-three frame.
I’m silent. Words push against my tongue like water against a dam. All the things I’ve never been able to say in 30 years of marriage collect like twigs caught in a sewer grate.
“This is the second time you’ve totaled a car when you’re drunk.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“I’m not taking more money out of my 401K to pay your debts.”
“I won’t get an abortion.”
I try to swallow as the knot of all these things left unsaid form a fist at the back of my throat.
Affirmation: I alone am accountable for expressing myself clearly.
I’m murmuring the words as my grey Hyundai Elantra passes through the toll booth on the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Before I can begin the next affirmation, my daughter calls.
“Mom, I wanted to warn you.”
My fingertips tingle as I grip the steering wheel.
“I was just at the house. Dad is out of control. I didn’t want you to walk into it.”
Walking into it means a fist punched through a closet door during an argument when we were dating. Dinner that wasn’t to his liking tossed in the garbage. My daughter’s backpack lobbed in her direction because she left it on the floor. It means listening to him pace up and down the hallway at 3 a.m., muttering threats about his boss.
I realize I’m holding my breath. For the next 60 miles, I breathe deeply, plotting how to delay arriving home until his anger runs out like a windup toy.
The next week, a different reiki master stands over me, hands outstretched, fingers splayed above my throat. “I’m clearing your throat chakra.” she tells me.
I envision a stream of pure, white light pouring up my esophagus, pushing past the epiglottis, the cartilage at the root of my tongue that guards the space between my vocal cords. I will it to stay open. At the end of the session, I climb off the table, feeling lighter. I ask, “Why is my throat chakra always closed?
The reiki master searches my face. “What is it that you need to say that you are not saying?”.
Affirmation: Being honest will free me from my current situation.
Spring, a year later. Driving to a friend’s house for dinner, I pass a sign announcing “Apartment for Rent.” I copy the phone number and arrange to go to see it. It’s a tiny efficiency, a single room with a separate bath. A huge bay window opens the space, like a door to another life. Don, the elderly man with a freckled bald head who shows it me, asks me what I do at the university, saying, “Usually the students are the only ones who want such a small place.” I don’t respond, so he adds, “I can knock $50 off the rent if you don’t take the garage.” My best friend, the one who sat in the back seat of my car the previous summer listening to my husband berate me for giving bad directions, lends me the money for the security deposit.
Now, whenever I speak to my husband, I tell a story that isn’t true. I say that I’m staying with a friend during the week because I’m tired of my long commute. Alone in the apartment, I sit on a single chair in the light of the window and imagine living there permanently. I still go home on weekends.
Affirmation: I speak my truth freely and openly.
I spend Thanksgiving in Pittsburgh with my 90-year-old aunt, leaving my husband to give thanks at a solitary table. As I prepare to start the 300-mile drive home, my aunt places her hand on my arm, a touch, both light and insistent, as she says. “You know your mother worried about you.” During my five-hour drive, I remember bending over my dying mother, whispering, “Mom, I promise I’ll take care of myself.” A broken promise.
Mile after mile, I rehearse my words, alternating them with the affirmations. I arrive at my apartment. Sit in the lone chair. Pick up my phone. When I hear my husband’s voice, my throat opens from a place deep within.
“I’m not coming home.”
Vicki Mayk is a writer, editor, and teacher whose work has appeared in the Brevity Blog, Hippocampus, Literary Mama, The Manifest-Station, eMerge Magazine, the anthology Air and others. Her narrative nonfiction book, Growing Up on the Gridiron: Football, Friendship and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas, was published by Beacon Press. She teaches adult nonfiction workshops. Catch up with her on Instagram @vickimayk or at vickimayk.com.