The Body Marks the Time

“Come on, let’s practice slapping.”

I looked up from the couch in our rented Airbnb, in Bonito, Brazil. My friend Zev was standing there, hand extended, waiting for me to take it so he could help me up from my seat.

I didn’t take it. “What?” I said instead, sure I’d misheard.

“Let’s practice slapping. It’s what we do in theater. Come on, get up.” Zev was an Israeli playwright on a year-long backpacking trip through South America. Dramatic is one very accurate word to describe him.

I hesitated, unsure of this exercise, and even more unsure that I wanted to be slapped.

“Look, if we’re not going to have sex, let’s at least do this. It’ll get some frustration out.” Blunt is another word to describe Zev.

I laughed. It was a question that had been hanging between us since we’d met. A question that would go unanswered, since we were both leaving for other corners of Brazil later that night. We were whiling away the hours, both of us irritable and impatient. The air was heavy.

That morning I had spent four hours writing about my mother, Karel—that very day was the anniversary of her death. I had rolled the words around so often and for so long that I could not get them out of my mind; writing them had not exorcised the energy those words carried. I was heavy.

“You go first,” he said.

“Like play slapping you mean?” I showed him the theater trick I’d been taught as a kid.

“No, I mean real slapping. We really slap. But you have to practice it because it’s hard to do.”

I’d never hit anyone before. This felt new and forbidden. I kept wondering if it was a trick but I looked at his earnest face and knew that he was not fooling around. I took a step back, wound up, and slapped him. Immediately my hand went to my mouth and I said “I”m so sorry! Did that hurt?!” In truth it was quite a wimpy slap. There was no power behind it.

“No,” he said, “You barely slapped me. It’s harder for the person doing the slapping than it is for the slapee. That’s why we practice this. Come on, again.”

I wound up and slapped, heart racing. My hand stung a little, and I could tell I had connected harder than the previous attempt, but it still didn’t affect him.

“Better. Again. Harder.”

I slapped again, feeling my own hesitation affect the swing and the connection to his face. I can only guess what my face looked like each time. One part fear, one part curiosity, one part preparation should I crack him too hard and provoke anger.

“That’s better, keep going. Come on, REALLY give it to me.”

So I did. I hit him. Hard.

But the effect was startling. It wasn’t him who reacted. It was me. My hand withdrew to my mouth again. Tears filled my eyes.

“That was good, good!” He said, looking at me encouragingly at first, and then pausing when he registered my face. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Look, I know this day has been hard for you. Come here.”

And then he held me while I cried and finally let it out. My body was doing what the writing couldn’t—releasing the energy of the moment in time.

***

I have a theory about time, grief, and how the body responds when it comes around to dates where everything changes, even when the conscious mind doesn’t know it.

Or to say it another way: time isn’t a line, it’s a spiral. We come around to dates that ruptured our lives. We are not in the same place, but at the same position in the coil of time. The seasons mark the cycles, the turn of the planet marks the seasons, and the body, a cyclical creature, feels the position in time whether the mind is paying attention or not. The echo continues down time because we keep coming back around: same date, same place in the cycle, never quite the same person walking through it.

The spiral as a way of holding time is old. It lives in Celtic stonework, in shamanic and indigenous traditions, in Jung’s writing on the return. I didn’t invent it. What I’m describing is the felt version—the way the body marks the anniversary of the events that shape our lives, even if you don’t. Even if you ignore it, pretend it didn’t happen, or didn’t even know the date.

The first anniversary of my mother’s death, I happened to be on a six month trip backpacking through South America. Before I left the States, I had the intention of going to Campinas, Brazil, to see where my family and I had lived together from the time I was an infant to about the age of two. I wanted to see the roots. As (bad) luck would have it, my visa to Brazil was denied, so I had decided to just wing it and go elsewhere in South America. While traveling, I found out there were other ways for me to apply to get into Brazil, and made it happen. On the night of this anniversary, I was getting on a 17-hour bus to Campinas to try and find one of my first homes.

I hadn’t planned any of that. It all just worked out that way, that strange coincidental shift in opportunities, timing, and fate—and guidance. Signs and coincidences kept nudging. When Zev and I had arrived at our Airbnb, we walked around and noted all of the modern details of the place, except for one old-fashioned choice: the locks on the bedroom doors had skeleton keys. I stood in the doorway, looking at the key and feeling the weight of it and the memory it sparked: it reminded me of the key my mother and I had once stolen from a bathroom in Europe.

When I was 15 she took me on a trip to see her friend, who lived in Bratislava, Slovakia. We toured around, we made a lot of stops at quaint European villages dotted throughout Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. These places looked like something straight out of a fairy tale. We were in the bathroom of a restaurant in a charming town called Český Krumlov, each of us in our own stalls, when I noticed that the doors closed with skeleton keys. I used to collect them. When I pointed this out, she paused for a moment, then giggled and said, “Maybe we should take it as a souvenir.” She always liked to do little “naughty” things like that, given that she considered herself a goody-two-shoes when she was a kid and was deeply fearful of getting in trouble. So we took the key, and I still have it, and I told Zev the story as I hefted the weight of the key in Brazil in my hand.

And, in another strange twist, within two days of landing in Campinas, I was diagnosed with pneumonia and had to stay put and rest for a minimum of two weeks. Camped out in yet another Airbnb, I had to sit and do very little for days at a time. In other words, I had to sit and process, to think, to feel, and to be with the loss, all while in Campinas.

My father, Scott, died ten years later. The first anniversary rocked me, even though I wasn’t paying attention to the date. I found myself weeping for no clear reason for days before and after, just down in the dumps. When I finally realized the date and what it meant, I realized my body had been processing what my mind could not, or would not.

The echo of these events continues down time. The anniversary of my mother’s death doesn’t affect me the same way, and neither does my father’s, but I always hold space in the calendar knowing that my body will mark the time whether I want to or not, no matter what is going on around me or required of me at the time.

It makes me wonder: What about all of those anniversaries for which I don’t know the dates? The first time you got your heart broken, the first time you experienced betrayal, the first time you felt the bitter shock of disappointment. Your first break up. The first time you doubted your parents’ ability to keep you safe. There’s an anniversary to all of the harshness of life, but we tend not to think in terms of actual calendar dates.

And it makes me wonder if the body marks them all, even without our awareness.

Not just sad anniversaries either. The inexplicable joy you feel on a Tuesday afternoon might come from the echo of your first kiss. The excitement that seems to have no source might come from the date of your first job offer, the one that made you feel like you could accomplish anything. The rush of possibility might be the imprint of the moment you went driving alone for the first time, after you got your driver’s license, and you felt the first real taste of freedom.

Maybe the body marks every single one of them.

***

I’m experiencing another anniversary again, the first year, one that marked a shift in my primary relationship with the father of my child. It was devastating. Hard. Mostly good and in a good direction, but world-breaking all the same. I felt the anniversary coming for weeks, in my body, animalistic, like something coiling with tension and ready to spring. The things that lined up: the flow of my period on the day of the anniversary (a release of pent up energy), a clarifying talk. The day a friend said “Congratulations” to the news, instead of “I’m so sorry.” A turning point marked in visceral, felt experiences.

This one has felt different, as far as anniversaries go. I saw this one coming, for one thing. I’ve been around the turn enough to know that it wouldn’t be “nothing.” But I didn’t weep with grief. There were some teeth-baring moments, some anger relived, but mostly I felt peace. I felt a desire to mark it not as a wound or as celebratory, but as something that deeply shifted the tectonic plates of my life. That, for better or worse, caused the wool to be pulled from my eyes (I could no longer pretend that I didn’t see all of the ways my life wasn’t working). That deserves an act of honoring.

This week, my daughter handed me a slinky that, for the third time, had tangled with itself. She had spent the previous five minutes trying to untangle it, bending it this way or that, even yanking at times… but nothing worked. Then she handed it to me in a huff of frustration. I looked at the slinky and its tangles.

A slinky is a spiral. It’s pointless to try and untangle it by yanking it this way and that. The only thing you can do to unkink it is put your fingers to the spot just below the tangle and slowly, faithfully work your way up the spiral, and eventually you will work it out after many turns.

We can’t fix time. When my body coils around one of these dates, I no longer use force. I no longer yank. I try to follow the tangle instead of fighting it.

***

A short while after our slap session, Zev and I left for the station where we would take two different buses in different directions. It was time to say goodbye. This was a hard goodbye, one that I was not going to feel okay with for a few days. I started crying again, and he said, “I have something for you.” And he held out his hand, and in it was the skeleton key from our Airbnb. I smiled and accepted his gift, and with that we parted ways.

I have two skeleton keys now. One I took with my mother. One I was given on the anniversary of the day I lost her. I keep them in the same place.