Rest and Respiration

It was a double, with two massage tables and two masseuses. They first asked us to select some music together, although the idea of urging a couple to agree on something in under a minute seems the very enemy of relaxation. We chose based on titles alone, and opted for ‘Yesterday’s Breath’, although ‘Transitory Insects’ and ‘Lost Curtains’ also sounded interesting, while ‘River Song’ sounded a little litigious for my liking.

The masseuses (I’m just going to call them massagers from now on) asked us to remove some clothes, while they left the room. We stripped down again to our swimming clothes, and tried to navigate the tables. There was a standard face hole at one end that had a small rolled-up towel round the top half. I pressed my face into the hole and found it incredibly uncomfortable. I couldn’t work out if my face was too big for the hole, or if I wasn’t doing it right, so I adjusted the towel and tried again. Still I found myself with most of my throat pushing against the bottom edge of the hole, but it would have to do. The massagers returned, greeting us with their comically soothing voices.

They got to work, pouring some oil onto my upper back and shoulders, an area that typically produces too much oil of its own. I thought better of saying anything to that effect, especially to someone who would spend the next half hour rubbing and staring at my back. Preaching to the converted. She proceeded to rub my back, but as she worked her way up towards my shoulders and neck, I felt the pressure pushing my throat harder onto the edge of the facehole. It quickly became less than the relaxing experience I had hoped for. Every time she kneaded my shoulders or neck, my eyes bulged and I felt I was going to choke. If there had been a camera underneath the facehole, it would have looked like I was doing an impersonation of Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting to breathe on the surface of Mars. There wasn’t a camera of course, just a confusing bowl of liquid with a flower floating in the middle. I assume it was there as a peaceful image, which became a taunting reminder of the sensation I was supposed to be feeling. Each time the pressure abated, I tried to shift my head and neck, but I couldn’t manage to get it right. And then the hands would ascend once again up my back and threaten to collapse my trachea as a form of tension relief. I was worried my girlfriend might be going through the same experience, assuming this was a design fault of the tables themselves, instead of my own inability to place my face into a hole designed for a face. I would have halted the massage entirely, but didn’t want to ruin the aura of calm in the room, and the longer I waited to say something, the longer it would be clear that I had just simply been lying there struggling to breath without saying anything. It soon turned into a morbid curiosity of how much pressure my windpipe could stand, until finally we were asked to turn over.

I understand some people like to choke themselves in order to enhance orgasm, and I also understand that some people expect to be brought to orgasm at the end of a massage, but I think it would be a lot to expect my massager to have deliberately conflated these two ideas into a choking massage, although if she had been working there a while, it would explain the lengthy forms we had to fill out at reception.

Laying on my back, we ended with a facial massage and treatment. I was glad to have the opportunity to relax, but felt the pressure of now having to get all my relaxing done in a shorter period of time. That problem quickly disappeared though, as the solution smeared onto my face was nothing short of expensive acid, meaning I wouldn’t have to relax at all. Once again I lay there silently, choosing to trust the massager and her cream rather than suffer the embarrassment of admitting my face might be melting off. Five burning minutes later, the cream was wiped away, and a soothing agent applied. I later suggested to my girlfriend that if they recognise the need for a soothing agent, perhaps the non-soothing agent isn’t soothing enough to begin with.

We dressed again, and left, meaning my chance for relaxation had ended. I decided to do my best to relax on the car drive home, but the memory of the morning’s car trouble was more than enough to keep my eyes wide and my grip on the steering wheel tighter than ever.

So ends my odyssey of self-discovery. In one day I realised I would overcome my introvert nature to ask strangers to help jump start my car, but dare not speak up as I paid for an expensive massager to almost collapse my trachea for half an hour.
My social ineptitude apparently allows me to save my car’s life, but not my own.

Next time on the Bandwagon, can’t we just have a nice meal as a family for a change?