3: Past Simple / Present Continuous
Thirty days ago, I woke up early for a Saturday, sent an eighteen-hundred word newsletter about my three miscarriages, and promptly hightailed it to Jeju.
Thirty days ago, I decided I was going to write about something different for the next issue of this newsletter. Something light 'n airy. Something the opposite of painful and isolating and infuriating. Something pleasant and bodily and warm and communal.
I know! I thought while sitting at the Korean spa. I will write about Korean spas!
And so I was going to tell you about the first time I went to Jeju. It was in December 2016, maybe five weeks after Trump was elected, maybe a week before I went to my first-ever therapy session—right there in those dark pre-holiday weeks that are rough even in a good year.
I was going to tell you about how Brooke and Ally and I drove up to Gwinnett one cold Saturday morning, checked in at the front desk, traded our drivers’ licenses for telephone-cord bracelets with the little plastic numbers, stashed our belongings in the women's locker room, and then we got naked.
I was going to tell you how weird it is to get naked in front of people, and stay naked in front of people, and then how suddenly it's not weird anymore, you're just naked. You're naked and you're soaking in the hot tub, or the extra-hot tub, or you're in the dry sauna or the steam sauna, or you're laid out like a lizard under the infrared lights. I was going to say something about how it’s amazing how quickly you can adapt to new scenarios, even ones you otherwise spend most of your life trying to avoid.
I was going to tell you about the body shampoo. I don't know why they call it that. “Shampoo” is such a gentle word, and the “body shampoo” is not gentle. You have to soak in one of the hot tubs for a while to get your skin ready. Then they call your number and you go into a room full of padded tables. You lay down on one of the padded tables and a woman drapes a damp cloth over your face and then she brutalizes you with—I don't even know what. A loofa? Concrete mitts? Feet to head, up one side and down the other. At some point you depart your body along with all the dead skin she's rasping away. You wonder if she's ever drawn blood. After a while she dumps a bucket of warm water over your supine form and says, "Turn over," and you do; you would do anything she told you to.
And maybe while you're turning over, the damp cloth momentarily slips from your eyes and you catch a glimpse of one of the other naked women on one of the other padded tables and you wonder at her body: how is it possible for a human to curve all of those different ways at once? And then you realize that what you're looking at is two women: one is a stranger, and one is a reflection in a nearby mirror, and the reflection is your own.
*
I was going to tell you about the soup nap. I am grateful to my friend Brooke for many things, not the least of which is her knowledge of the soup nap. The soup nap comes after the scrubbing. Once the woman has dismissed you from the padded table, once you are all smooth and empinkened, once you have showered off the remains of your dearly departed epidermis, you pull on the gigantic t-shirt and the gigantic elastic-waist shorts you were handed at check-in (all shades of peachy beige, universally unflattering, a true achievement) and you head to the food court. The food court is in the co-ed area between the women's locker room and the men's locker room. It's weird to be reminded that there are men at Jeju, but there they are, recently-naked and now clad in their own nightmare sherbet garb.
Any soup is good for a soup nap. Brooke advises ramen. And it's not required, but it's nice to have one of the aloe drinks too (any flavor). So you order and you sit and eat, and it's important to intermittently sigh and say to your friends, "I feel so nice right now." This is also a good time to discuss which of the relaxation rooms you will be napping in. Maybe the jade igloo? Maybe the charcoal room? Or maybe you will just lay upon the heated tile floor under one of the TVs playing South Korean cable news. The beauty of soup nap is that, as long as you have the soup, and as long as you have the nap, you cannot go wrong.
It's good to have something to read. Here is where you can go all sorts of wrong. For my first Jeju visit, I brought along the book I was already reading, which happened to be The Underground Railroad, because I guess a looming Trump presidency wasn't causing me quite enough psychic pain on its own? Anyway, the relaxation rooms are dim little things so you can't really read a page anyway. Audiobooks are the ticket. I can report that Paul Shelley reading John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and Juliet Stevenson reading Middlemarch are ideal narrative soundtracks for deep and thorough soup nap.
*
What else?
I was going to wonder about the hip bath, and the upstairs gym, and the presence of children.
I was going to spend some time reading and sorting through all the complicated things around race and class and gender in these spaces.
I was going to note that, this time, they weren't playing South Korean cable news on the TV in the co-ed area. The TVs were turned off.
I was going to note that the employees at the front desk were all wearing surgical masks when we arrived in the morning, but by the time we left that afternoon they weren’t wearing them anymore.
They're overreacting, I thought; I hoped.
*
Thirty days ago, I was fully naked in a hot wet room with a dozen strangers.
I was fully clothed in a hot dry room with strangers.
I was in so many rooms with so many people.
I was using metal tongs to lift a cupcake from a smudged bakery case. I was high-fiving a three-year-old. I was waiting for my order at the bar.
I was thinking about Maine in May and Chicago in June and Scotland in July.
I was grabbing the tall half-n-half, the double-pack of toothpaste, the 300-count Zyrtec off the shelf at Target, like, just in case. I was pulling the copy of My Year of Rest and Relaxation I bought in 2017 off the shelf thinking, Ah yes, now’s the time!
I was touching my face. Remember when we touched our faces? Remember when we felt like we were really accomplishing something by trying not to touch our faces? Remember the first time you told someone not to touch their face and the look on their face in that moment and then how you'd kinda laugh? We were all touching so much all the time.
*
So that's how it was.
So how is it now?
I am healthy, my family is healthy, my friends are healthy. My company is doing mandatory work-from-home. My husband is recording his podcast in our bedroom closet. The dog is thrilled by our extended presence at home. I am still touching my face, but I am doing it inside my house, having touched no one but my husband and my dog for more than two weeks. I am Zooming more than I ever hung out in meatspace. I am doing Instagram Stories, apparently? We have plenty of food. We have gift cards to our favorite restaurants for “whenever” they reopen. We get takeout on Fridays. We are lucky. Short of a worth-half-a-shit state and federal government, we have everything we need.
For now, I keep wanting to add lately. We are for now, we have for now, I am for now. For now for now for now.
As if everything before this wasn't temporary too.