A loud buzz signals that the metallic hammering is about to begin, a technological blacksmith pounding my molecules against an electronic anvil. The noises vary in pitch and length, long patterns that hold for a while and then change, slamming against the giant red noise-canceling headphones that can’t keep out the aural onslaught. But the sounds make patterns, comforting in their regularity, engaging in their changes.

First, the intro to MIA’s “Paper Planes” seems to be playing, but the chord change never comes and I settle into its sameness for a while. Then I imagine the sounds to be a big long Philip Glass opus, like the score for Koyaanisqatsi; I imagine the landscapes and urban decay and people mobs of those images set to the clinks of the MRI machine. I think of Bang on a Can, Aphex Twin. I remember the movie Altered States.

I imagine that if an entirely spondaic line of poetry could exist, it would sound like this. The machine throbs. I think about those pod-bed “hotels” in Japanese airports. The pulse intensifies. I hear the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” when she imagines the mourners tromping, “treading—treading–” across her soul with “boots of lead.” The tempo shifts. The pitch increases. I am in a private space and my mind is meandering first to concrete comparisons and favorite people, then just abstractions, flashes of color and feelings of sound.

The technician interrupts on the loudspeaker every few minutes to let me know when another round of noises will begin, and I find that when the noises stop, I start to wish he wouldn’t say anything. I am sure he does so because most people find it comforting to hear the human voice, but I like the buzzes and beeps and the total retreat.

In between rounds, the technician reels me up to the surface and I find I don’t really want to go. He makes fun of me for looking away when he hooks the IV into my arm, and I object to this because I am really not freaking out; it’s just that no one actually likes to watch that jab, right? Or looks forward to it? It makes me want to dive back inside to escape his jollity.

Instead, since it’s not up to me when I glide back in, I ask the technician what makes the noises, and he says the sound is there to move the microelectrons in my bloodstream, to upset them so they register an image. A few minutes later, face down in the tube, I feel the cold contrast dye seeping sluggishly into my vein and settle in for the next song. And I can feel the electromagnets pulling on the fluids in my body like a lunar banshee of a moon-tide. My ear piercing vibrates under the headphones as the force of science tugs at it. But the itch stops soon and all that’s left is the hail of pure powerful sound.

I emerge from the tube with deep red grooves on my cheeks from lying face down on the face cradle. I absently mention that the music was good and he says oh boy, I’m worried now, she’s hallucinating, so I stop talking about it. Groggy and quiet after my time in the tube, I want to keep my thoughts to myself. I duck my head as I walk through the loud waiting room in hopes that my hair will hide the marks on my face, into the different sounds of a different atmosphere. I sort of miss the music.

When I was a teenager, I fantasized about being 35. I had all these things I wanted to do with my body and brain. I wanted to fuck around and not care what anyone thought, and I wanted to be at the height of my intellectual control. I wanted to have answers for questions, and for people to take me seriously when I delivered my thoughts. I planned to spend my 20′s doing what I had to in order to ensure that, by my mid-30′s, I was undeniably well-informed, sexually experienced, and pulling back against the overeager narcissism of youth. I wouldn’t need validation anymore because I would be a complete person without neediness. I would exude competence.

In my 20′s, I fantasized about being 45. When I met women in their mid-40′s, they seemed so blissful. They often acknowledged my emotional opacity and said that it was OK; eventually it will be much safer to have feelings. Someday it wouldn’t be impossible to recognize good people, and that I’d learn, over the coming decades, what it feels like to be treated with dignity and care. In my 40′s, I might lose some of my rough, prickly shell. I decided that in my 30′s, I’d do what I had to do to learn how to relate to other people with trust and honesty.

In my 30′s now, I envy my friends who are 55. They are empresses who tilt their heads and say, “I think that’s right,” in order to agree. They get sad, even in public, and instead of everyone telling them to toughen up, we all cry along. When a 55-year-old cries, she cries with authority. No one accuses a 50-something woman of being needy, or just wanting attention, or trying to be sexy, because a woman of that age simply has needs, demands attention, and, often by not trying at all, is sexy, in a way that does not require physical intercourse to prove. Best of all, they don’t require intercourse anymore.

That was the part of the Roseanne Barr article that made me so envious. I knew there would come a time in my life when sex stopped being appealing just because it was a big mysterious realm of private experience that I didn’t yet have. What I didn’t realize is that one can have satisfied all one’s curiosity and interest in physical sex, while still feeling a zombie-like compulsion to make it happen, or at least to be thinking of ways that one might potentially try to make it happen. Maybe I thought that it only happened to men. I still have at least 20 years ahead of me before I get any relief. Horrible.

On fulfilling the fantasies of my youth, I am doing a pretty good job. I’ve become almost exactly what I thought I would be when I was a teenager thinking about my mid-30′s self, and, in preparation for having a full emotional life in my 40′s, I’m experimenting with having feelings occasionally, and taking much better notes about interpersonal relationships and how they work. Maybe in ten years, I’ll be eyeing those 65-year-olds with squinty-eyed jealousy.

It’s kind of awesome.  She has ways of dealing with life, the universe and everything.  It’s an ideology, but not one that freaks me out.  I’m madly averse to organized religion.  But this doesn’t scare me.

Thing I learned from Tara: make space for the anxiety and stress or whatever emotion you’re feeling.  And inquire.  Inquire where it’s from and what’s beneath it.  Give it the space it asks for.  And strangely and magically it breaks down.  It doesn’t disappear.  But it becomes a part of the jigsaw, not the whole puzzle.

And say yes to the emotional guests, good and bad.  Don’t deny them.  Learn from them.  It feels quite dramatic to stop castigating oneself for feeling negative and being open to feelings without prejudice.

I know!  It sounds like I joined a cult.  But it’s such a nice cult.

The new thing is: Let’s run 6.5 miles in a race next month! Sigh.

As I keep telling people, 6.5 miles is a lot of running for a fat girl. At this point, everyone makes nice high eye contact and proclaims, “Preposterous! I’ve never heard such a ridiculous description of a human body in all my life!” Ugh, no, we’re not having the “Am I rilly beautiful talk?” now; we’re having the “bodies moving through space at a certain rate for a particular distance” conversation. We’re having the “I’m going to die alone in the woods during this race!” conversation.

I did used to run, about 6-7 years ago, for a brief while that I recall fondly as the year when I vomited every day. Some things I got better at, like breathing and getting my guts to hold themselves together. One month I ran 127 miles. But back then, let’s remember, I was 25 and the neurons in my brain hadn’t fully mylenated. Once they did, I realized that all I talked about was running, all I thought about was running, and I was in an unspoken contest with the bulimic girl downstairs for who could spend more time per day puking. I didn’t want to live that way anymore.

So the puking: It turns out I don’t really experience pain in the normal way. I don’t know what the normal way is supposed to be, but it tells people, in a sane and predictable manner, that they’ve gone too far, right? No matter what happens to me, from tapping a table too hard to the day after oral surgery, pain is like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! oh no! ah! If I cut myself, I have no idea until I inspect the wound whether I’ve barely scraped the skin or sawed almost down to the bone. It’s just aaaaaaaah! oh no! either way.

When I run, it feels the same if I’m going slowly or quickly, short or far. I went for the first run in years a few weeks ago, and zipped through the first mile in a time that I still scarcely believe, it’s so fast. I was excited to do so well and thought about doing another, having stopped, and I realized my internal organs were about to leak out of my bodily cavities, having been pulverized by unaccustomed jostling. I was in horrible pain. I limped home, defeated by my own stupidity, and barely managed to draw a hot bath to pass out in. Never again, I thought.

This time, however, I’m running with some other people, who are good at keeping a slower pace and not being overly ambitious. When I’m running with them, I feel as if they’re killing me, making me do this bullshit that I don’t want to do, and fine, Jesus Christ, we’ll take a right up the hill assholes. But they’re saving me from myself, so I don’t get bored and tear off for home, only to barf on the threshold.

We’ll see if I make it up to 6.5 miles by a month from tomorrow. If you don’t hear from me soon after, you’ll know that I was the one the wolves decided was the easiest pickings.