Honestly, the things I’ll do for a little movement on a sunday afternoon
anyway, I let a woman pull an octopus out of my hip and now the air feels weird
I don’t know how I ended up here.
Actually —
I do.
My therapist asked me something the week before that landed in that sharp, slanted way certain questions do when you're not wearing your emotional armor.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Did my usual loop.
Tarot. (The Martyr, obviously.)
Half-slept. Google sesh again.
Ended up on some reiki website with a booking button.
Clicked it.
Not because I was falling apart.
Not because I believed it would fix anything.
Just because something needed to move.
And I dunno, it’s something to do on a sunday aft.
My rational brain was like, really? this?
But my curious brain — she wins.
She said it like she was noticing something normal. Like lint.
“Oh honey, there’s a whole octopus wrapped around your left hip bone. Let’s get her out.”
Just.
Like.
That.
TBH, I was soaking it all up.
YESSSS, of course, that’s what it’s been all along.
I didn’t laugh.
I nodded.
Because I could feel her.
The octopus.
Sliding.
Heavy.
Warm.
Leaving.
Like electric water draining out of me.
Cold.
Sad.
Done.
And I swear —
I missed her.
Before she was even gone.
Like my body already knew she wasn’t coming back.
And was lowkey grieving it mid-exit.
My body believed it before I did.
(It usually does.)
She wasn’t “real.”
But also — yeah. She was.
She’d been there so long I forgot she wasn’t me.
Like when you take your bra off at the end of the day and your skin still feels the pressure of it.
Or how you forget your sunglasses are on your head until they’re not.
And then your skull feels wrong.
Since then? Everything’s felt too spacious.
Not in a freeing way.
More like the room got rearranged but nobody told me.
Like walking into your apartment and everything’s in the same place
but none of it feels where it should be.
My left side keeps reaching for weight that isn’t there.
Not literally. Just like… psychically.
Like it’s leaning out of habit.
The air around that part of me feels echoey.
Like something used to be there, and the silence knows it.
I asked my husband to pick up my favorite apples.
The ones they only carry at that one grocery store back in our old neighborhood.
Told him about the session.
He nodded slowly like he was waiting to see if I was joking.
I wasn’t.
I said, “She pulled an octopus out of my hip.”
He blinked.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Empty,” I said.
“Actually, I dunno.”
The apples tasted exactly right.
But everything else was wrong.
Or maybe just… flattened.
I started wondering:
What else lives in the body like that?
What else is wrapped around bone pretending it belongs?
I googled it. Again.
Somatic memory.
Fascia.
“The body stores trauma.”
You know, the usual.
Apparently hips are storage lockers for things you never dealt with.
So are jaws.
So is the pelvic floor, which makes sense honestly.
Our bodies are like junk drawers.
Full of receipts and grief and plastic forks from takeout we didn’t finish.
But no one tells you what happens when the thing finally leaves.
Like what are you supposed to do with the space it was holding?
The healer said the octopus had been there for years.
She couldn’t say when exactly.
But told me to pay attention to what memories bubbled up after.
Quick little flashes of the most random forgotten moments.
Me, in my grandma’s kitchen watching her make “potato casserole” —
those slimy canned sliced potatoes in water, (do those still exist? I should buy them) dumped in a pan, smothered in ketchup.
No instructions.
Snow-shoeing with my aunt and uncle when I was maybe five.
Boots way too big.
Snow squeaking.
Doctor’s office. Seven?
Tiny little class photos parents had sent of all the kids he had delivered scattered his walls.
My legs swinging off the edge, not reaching the floor.
All these people are gone now.
Maybe she wasn’t guarding one specific thing.
Maybe she was holding all the leavings.
Every person I didn’t realize was disappearing when they did.
“She’s not hurting you,
she just didn’t know she was supposed to leave.”
Yeah. That sounded about right.
She’d been keeping me from splitting open without me noticing.
Eight arms wrapped around my hip,
literallllly holding me together every time someone I loved just... left.
I don't know what's more haunting.
That, or how gentle the exit was.
Like ice melting off a roof.
So no — I didn’t feel lighter.
I felt unstructured.
Now I keep checking the space where she lived.
Not with my hands.
Just with my attention.
Like the emotional version of checking your phone for a notification that isn’t there.
Sometimes I hold my breath to see if I can feel her.
I can’t.
But I keep trying.
What happens to the energy something was holding when it leaves?
Does it float off?
Sink down into your feet?
Go haunt someone else?
Do I fill the space?
Clean it?
Let it echo?
Or maybe emptiness is just what healing feels like sometimes.
Not the bad kind.
Not the good kind.
Just… space.
I want someone to ask me how I'm doing.
But also I want everyone to just leave me alooooone.
Not forever, just for 5 minutes.
I want to feel lighter.
But also, I want to know who I am without eight arms holding my whole left side together.
Healing is weird.
It doesn’t feel like getting better.
It feels like getting emptied out and hoping that’s allowed.
Like someone cleaned out a closet I didn’t remember having,
and now I’m just standing there like…
okay, now what?
The space is still there.
And I keep poking it.
Like a bruise that healed too fast.
Just to see if it still remembers.
This morning I woke up feeling this lump in my throat.
Like something’s stuck.
Or waiting.
Or maybe it already passed through and I missed it.
I don’t know what it means.
But my body does.
It always does.
And just when I think I’m done,
my body finds another room.
Another hallway.
Another locked door.
Another octopus.
One step at a time, I guess.
Even when I can’t see the floor.
Even when something lets go before I understand what it was holding.
Even when I lose something I didn’t know I loved.
Even when no one else will ever know her name.
Even when goodbye sounds like a sigh you forgot to let out years ago.
If you need the science:
Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score
and Peter Levine's work on Somatic Experiencing.
Look them up.
But honestly —
your body already knows.