“Treatment” Rooms

I love how spas call the rooms where naked ladies in robes have things done to them in “treatment rooms”.

I love how many different kinds of spas there are, and how many different “treatments”.

I dream of hours — DAYS — spent in “treatment rooms”. Being treated. For my invalid conditions.

I am quite fond of “treatment rooms”. In facilities like this one, where I last received a massage five years ago on this day exactly: May 5th, 2019.

Big old buildings that have functioned in various different capacities over decades and centuries: housing soldiers, schooling civilians … treating the mentally ill and others needing rehabilitation. Converted now into special settings for (mostly) women to receive deep, intimate, tender, and often spiritualized “treatments”.

I love how the rooms are small and often weirdly-shaped with puzzling locations within unpredictable floor plan layouts. I love how they could have been closets or classrooms or staff bedrooms or offices or nurseries or all of these things at one time or another.

I like these spaces  and “treatment rooms” imbued with a bit of a road-to-Wellville vibe, where rich sexually-repressed women checked in to be controlled, financially drained, tortured, and brought to orgasmic relief in ways thought wholesome and medically-approved, once-upon-a-time.

I fantasize about being in the position to undergo wellness “treatments”. As a full-time resident in a somewhat institutional setting. For a long weekend, a whole week … an entire month or more.

I don’t want to be tortured, starved, or financially exploited. But I do want to be controlled in many ways. Customized to my preferences, of course. For my schedule to be SET, with all-inclusive meals at specific times, mandatory treatments for multiple hours daily (massage in an array of modalities, passive stretching, hydrotherapy, sensory-deprivation tanks, forest bathing, hypnosis, strengths-finding, etc.) plus optional classes and events that ALL take a back seat to getting plenty of sleep, with rest breaks routinely set throughout the day: opportunities to lounge in a deathly-quiet library wearing extremely comfortable pajama-like hospital-inmate spa-garb, laying about in full repose with lap blankets of perfect size and weight close at hand, completely clean and free of allergens.

When you’re in treatment rooms and have spent an hour or more being “treated”, it is beautifully easy to forget what the world looks like outside of the room. To not know what time of day it is.

In the treatment room you forget the sun is shining brightly out there somewhere. Because the windows of treatment rooms are covered, and/or located way up high beyond eye-level, and/or are composed of thick wavy glass blocks treated to blur your body and its relation to reality, sucking you into a surreal and dreamy state (especially when many treatments literally do lull you to sleep).

Sometimes there are no windows. Sometimes they are false, like a tv screen displaying a view of the ocean from within an inside cabin on a cruise ship, or like doors leading to nowhere in the Winchester Mystery House. Boxes carved in the wall containing heavily-insulated illusions.

I want so very much to be taken into one of these facilities for an extended stay, or at least long enough to need guidance to get out of it after being sedated by intoxicating treatments. Led by gentle, soft hands through a labyrinth of liminal spaces winding between more and more specialized treatment rooms, finally to emerge at an enormous warm double-door into the most buttery golden sunlight barely making it past the solid buildings encircling this particular super-spa-PLUS. Where everyone and everything is here to treat you to better health and wellness, which you obviously so desperately need.

I want to stay until my vision is blurry, and everywhere I turn there is a small room dominated by a single surface designed to be a special kind of bed.