At the Spa

A Chapter by Sophie D (not the pornstar)

It happened at the spa.

“Just relax and think of nothing”, she said as she oiled up her hands and started rubbing the back of my legs. To think of nothing, I wondered what that would feel like. I know a lot of people can do it, ‘cause when they’re staring and you ask what they’re thinking about they’ll just say “oh, nothing”. They might be lying, but I don’t think they are. I usually know when people are lying.

I’m curious what it’s like though, inside their heads, when they’re thinking about nothing. Is it like wandering through a museum, all by yourself, with all your thoughts neatly arranged on the walls like paintings, and your voice softly echoing in the large, empty rooms. Hello oh-oh-oh? Or is it more like a sedation, a fog in the brain, a mist in the mind?

I wouldn’t really know. My head is always a noisy fin-de-siècle style bar, with drunk philosophers arguing vivaciously and a bombshell of a woman sipping from a glass of her own tears because we’re all out of Martini. And just when you think you’ve grasped the situation here, there’s a dwarf on a unicycle cruising on the ceiling and a little kid playing the cello upside down.

All of this was going through my head while I was supposed to think of nothing. Way to go. The lady had moved up to my back and as she was working on my shoulders she pushed her breasts in my neck and breathed sort of heavily. I kind of wanted it to be erotic, but it wasn’t at all, not even a bit. In the background music was playing, a Japanese lady lamenting her long lost love and the tragedy of her country. I don’t speak Japanese so I don’t actually know.

I can tell you about tragedy though, because the next thing I had scheduled was a bikini waxing. An insane and masochistic practice. No man in his right mind would do it. Luckily I’m not a man, I'm a woman and I’m totally in my wrong mind anyway. This time the goal wasn’t to think of nothing. It was to think of anything, anything, absolutely anything else than what was actually happening to me below my navel. So I thought of Beyoncé, as you do, and I thought about her bikini waxings and how there was someone out there in the world who knew exactly what Beyonce’s fun parts looked like and who tortured them on a fairly regular basis.