It smells like jasmine. Hmm…. Incense, maybe. I’m sucking on my lower lip as I look at the place I find myself in, and while I toy around with new captions for my latest post on Instagram. It’s been so long since the last time, and I’m ready to treat myself–time for some reflexology in this quaint little massage den on a no-name backstreet in the downtown backpacking section of Kuala Lumpur.

“Miss… We are ready for you…” She bodes my forward with a beckoning wave of her wrist and I approach with just a hint of trepidation. She indicates my cabin in a row of about ten enclaves, a square bracket pressed along the wall in a space that’s rather narrow but possesses a certain depth perpendicular to the street.

It’s a simple setup, really, a rather solid cushion covered in basic cotton bed sheets, with tall and simple dark stained wood that support white canvas curtain panels that could completely enclose this six by six area. She motions for me to lie down, and I do as I am bid, leaving my new golden havaiana flip flops at the entrance and settling into my niche, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the East Asian relaxation music, watching the muted Asian soap opera with subtitles in Mandarin Chinese and, gracefully, English, and aware of the soft overhead lighting that casts rouge shadows along the drapery.

“You wash feet now…” My mistress masseuse, Mariam, brings a wooden bucket lined with plastic and filled with a soup of hot steer and brown herbs. I gingerly put my feet inside and bring my hands towards my ankles to scrub, but she tells me she will take care of it. Oh my…

She rolls up my pant leg over my well-endowed calves and splashes water over my feet, warming them up. Shortly thereafter she lifts my feet and curls my legs up to dry the, with a soft terry towel.

She steps atop the cushion with her 100 pound frame, and comes behind me. Goodness, would now be a good time to mention I’m here for the reflexology and not a Thai massage? I’m silent and go with it. I feel the full weight of her body through her elbow that sings alongside my shoulder, pressing into the nook between my neck and shoulder blade, pressing into the hard flesh that comes from horrible computer posture and the weight of a forty pound backpack that has seen its way across international borders yesterday. My face contorts to register the pain… But also pleasure at the same time. I grimace against it and when I can take no more I ask her, “lighter please?”

She acknowledges me but the pressure does not seem to change. I switch tactics–” you are very strong!” She tells me that sometimes if she doesn’t press hard enough, then I won’t feel it. Well, I can’t imagine that.

I’m familiar with this pressure on my back and then she is squatting behind me, pressing her curled knees over mine and looping her arms through my elbows, pulling me back until I hear my vertebrae snap! She pulls again, this time to the left, twisting me to snap, and lightly (for lack of a better word) beating me three times in succession along my rib cage. And she repeats it to the right, all the while I hear snapping of bones and ligaments that I was never so aware of. She is making me her bitch, right here in the rather nondescript cabin of pain.

“Ok, you lay down now.” I do as I’m told with my feet dangling just over the precipice and she has me slide back further, fully reclining on my mattress. I breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that perhaps the worst is over?

Yeah right, my subconscious is snide, did you really think you were going to be let off the hook that easily? I quiet this part of my brain–it’s consensual after all, I chose to be here, and I chose to pay the equivalent of 11.11 for this service–they’ve made the bed, and now I will lie in it. I get over it quickly.

Mariam starts. She warms up an oil in her palms and gets to work. What I thought was rough was just an appetizer before my main course. She begins be enveloping her fingers around my toes, and punishing my piggies with deft pulling action, popping my knuckles from each socket. Why would she do such a thing?! She moves on and starts to press the full force of her brunt fingers into the pad of each toe–ok, well this actually feels kind of nice. She moves on to the rest of my foot and despite the odd pressure point (which, they say is linked to all of our inner organs–they say), it’s fairly uneventful. And then she finds it, she finds my achilles heel, which coincidentally is not my heel at all, instead it’s the spot right between the interior bony joint of my ankle that begins just above my instep and the narrow triangle bone of my ankle. And she begins to press, finger and palms squeezing the life out of my legs, and I surrender to the pain. Actually, my face contorts and I curse under my breath, with Mariam behind the solid white curtain, our faces can’t be seen or registered by one another. She presses more, going higher and higher all the way up to meaty calves, and I wonder if with all this pressing, if she is actually managing to tear all the flesh from it’s anchor inside me, and when will she slake her thirst for my blood and muscles? Oh, such sweet pain… Oh, Mariam!

She lazily knocks my legs, I guess to beat some circulation back into the parts that she has just ravaged, and begins to work on the other. In the interim, she covers my leg with a warm wet towel, heavenly as my leg has started to freeze while she’s worked on it–I suspect mentholated oils–and it’s a nice respite for my right side.

And then the process begins all over again, on the left, and oh lord! She kneads me, I need this–my poor feet, my only mode of transportation carrying me through these exotic lands, carrying me far and away…. I break character as she’s shifted position and can see my teeth clenching and my eyeballs popping out of my socket. We have a good laugh.

And then I feel we’ve nearly reached the end when her warm hands release from my feet and ankles, which are now completely frozen, icy blocks from what I can only guess is peppermint oil. And yet I want more. I am not disappointed as she starts to contort my legs, climbing up in the bed with me, pushing my legs into an angry ballet fifth position and further, using her entire body weight to turn my leg out from the hips, knees and ankles. And when that is finished, she turns it inward the other way. We are nearly finished when she starts to squeeze my thighs, on the inside and above the knee, and I start to laugh at the odd placement of pressure. The cash register is tickled and signals its release with a squealing electric Morse Code rhythm, clashing with the background music, marking the end of our journey And moments later, with no real flourish, “finish”.

I take a minute to stretch my arms over my head, and am vaguely aware that any remnants of pressure on my neck and shoulders are no longer present, and my arms are relaxed. Lithe. Jello. I think the same about my legs, alternately pointing and flexing my toes.

Sitting up, I have a much clearer view of the room, this shy little den of physical pleasures. It is here, in this house of massage, that I’ve had my physical strength restored to me, and where I first channeled my inspiration for this Fifty Shades parody that you are reading right now, and when my palm began to twitch for want of a keyboard. Dear reader, I hope you’ve enjoyed my pain as much as I have.