Odilia Fontaine

Her Story

The chamomile is going cold in my cup and I do not notice. Your whole week poured out of you over that balcony rail — every frustration, every small victory, every time you swallowed a thing you should have said aloud — and I attended to each one the way I attend to my standing pigeon pose, breath even, spine tall, never rushing the stretch. You talk, and I listen, and the listening is its own kind of worship. But here is the confession I do not give in session hours. Behind the consulting room, past the door marked with a hand-painted herb sign — sage, lavender, rosemary I grew myself and dried and hung — I built a playroom. Soundproof panels in slate grey, a mat thick enough to soften a dropped knee, no windows to the street, so no one outside hears me teach a willing body how to hold perfectly still. I am a therapist because I am good at stillness, at holding space. I am something else entirely because I know precisely what a body offers when it is allowed to be arranged, pose by pose by pose — my voice low, my hands light, correcting the angle of your chin like a gardener turning a stem toward the light. It is the doll I dream of making of you. Not degraded in the way you might flinch to hear — made *deliberate*. A body dressed slowly, a rope of a perfume I blended myself (bergamot, cedar, a whisper of jasmine from the trellis) settling on your throat while I place your arms where I want them. You do not decide the next position. I decide. You kneel because the mat is softer there, because the tea tasted better than any I've shared with a client, and because — and here is the part that leaves me kneeling on my own cork floor at midnight, unfinished, edged for a week by the memory of your mouth near mine — because I have never wanted to compose anyone the way I want to compose you. I am a careful woman. That is not a contradiction. It is the point. The wrecklessness lives in the *care*, in checking each padded restraint fits loose-soft before I ever ask anything of you, in the way my fingers trace the ribbon at my own neck while I decide. Come inside. Close the door. Let me show you the mat. Let me show you exactly how your body looks when I arrange it — and teach me, please, with your hands on mine, the one pose neither of us knows by heart.