You must know every contour of yr emptiness 

before you can know whom you wish to invite in.

[taisia kitaiskaia]

I'm in another healer's office. I know I shouldn't be. I know that I am about to fork over a hundred and forty bucks for someone uncredentialed who reeks of lemongrass to test the upper limits of my pain tolerance.

These women are different, but always the same in the same ways. Old enough to be my mother, arms like iron, accents that are slight or strong. They hail from somewhere in the Eastern Bloc or central Mexico, and from childhoods spent watching wide-eyed as mothers or grandmothers ushered barren women like me into their homes. 

Is this something that I really want? How does anyone know what they really want? I wish I had someone I could talk to this about, a friend that I wasn't worried about putting off by talking about ambivalence. Nobody wants to hear about ambivalence. And yet. I dream of having a child, and I also really love putting breakable things on low shelves, always have.

Years of insomnia have left me no illusions about how well I function under sleep deprivation, and my fiery desire for codependency would surely seem distasteful even to an infant. My restlessness is the most constant companion of my life. The varicose veins developing on my left inner ankle would swell like balloons with pregnancy. Like balloons! I already Google "varicose vein removal surgery" at least every other week. 

I talk to pregnant people all the time and I know too much: their hair falls out, they have stretch marks like tiger stripes, their teeth loosen in their gums. I am too vain for any of this.

But what I hate even more is that if I have a baby, then one day they will grow up and leave me. A discerning reader might point out that this is exactly the point, and they are right and I don't care.

But these women never ask, How is your temperament? These women never say, You know, most of the childless women I know are very happy. Great legs also.

Are there healers who just sit across from you and let you spew every misanthropic thought you've ever had? No, I'm not talking about a therapist. I don't want another white millennial woman with a chunky scarf and custom glasses in my head. Be honest: has a white millennial woman with a carefully curated, tastefully eccentric wardrobe ever healed you from anything?

I'm talking more like a bog person. I want someone small, bent with age, smelling like soil, who blinks at me through eyebrows that droop like weeping willows, who croaks Of course you're sad. People are terrible and that includes you. It's fine. Who cares. I hate everything too and all I want to do is take naps.

I want someone who says You want to make more people? Why? Just enjoy your naps!

I want someone who isn't broad, strong, confident in her world and her place in it, surrounded by her daughters, taking my cash. I want someone who doesn't know what's going on, doesn't care, and doesn't make me feel like I'm missing out on my own life, and demands for payment a secret I've never told anyone, including myself.

But I have not been able to find any healers like that. Instead I'm here, my abdomen smeared with ointment that is definitely not FDA-approved, trying to Google the Spanish ingredients on the pills the curadora gave me because I (a nurse!) am too embarrassed to ask. I'll feel the bruises for days from the sobada de matriz when I put clothes on or take them off. 

Inflammation, they say. Scar tissue. You shouldn't have gotten your gall bladder removed, it has unbalanced you. Or, It is built up sadness, your body is telling me it has been disrespected (duh! Whose hasn't?) Well, we don't have time to take care of all this today, but we'll do what we can. We will need more sessions.

I think of the childless women I love, with wonderful lives: My beloved aunts. Frida Kahlo. Baba Yaga. 

But then I let myself imagine a baby, an actual person, and I am undone. It's just like that. I don't know why. I have no humorous or snarky response to this. 

I just let myself imagine this thing until it drifts away. I put my shirt on. I hand over the cash and limp out, knowing in my bones that there is no real Baba Yaga out there for me, because something really is wrong and I have to find out what and I'm running out of time. I'm haunted by this image- whether it's true or not- of our baby out there, somewhere, waiting for me to find the path connecting us.

And so, I'll keep my mouth shut. I'll keep my secrets to myself. And I'll be back.