Duration
An hour is a reasonable unit of time for a massage. It fits a diary. It has a clear beginning and end. It asks nothing excessive of either person in the room.
For many men who visited me over the years, the hour was what they came for and what served them, and they arrived knowing this and left having had it, and the shape of the session matched the shape of what they needed.
What I also noticed, as the years passed, was the quality of what happened as a session approached its end. A man who had arrived with a particular tension—the shoulders, the breath, the slightly careful management of himself in an unfamiliar room—would begin to release that tension at some point during the massage. The timing varied. Some men found it quickly. Others were still releasing it in the final minutes, and when those men left, I sometimes found myself wondering what they might have found with another thirty minutes. I watched this happen enough times that the question stopped being hypothetical.
So I created two additional offerings. I called them “body play” rather than massage, because massage implies something specific and what I was offering was less defined than that—a longer duration in which a man could move through whatever the time produced, without the implicit pressure of a clock running against him.
The first lasted two hours. The second lasted three. I charged more for the longer sessions rather than less, which differed from what I understood to be standard practice in my field. I had learned years earlier, working as an adult trainer in a technical area, that two hours was roughly the limit a person could sustain before information began to pile up faster than it could be absorbed.
The body play sessions confirmed something related: two hours produced a quality of ease that one hour was still building toward when the session ended. The two-hour session was consistently the more popular of the two.
The three-hour sessions attracted men for whom the two hours had produced something they were reluctant to leave, or men who had come from a distance and for whom the journey itself created a different kind of permission—the sense of having travelled specifically for this, which released the ordinary hesitation about how much time was reasonable to take.
Day-long sessions, and occasionally overnight arrangements for men who had come from overseas or interstate, extended this further still. A man who had flown from another country occupied his own studio time differently from a man who had driven an hour from the city. The distance he had covered was itself a kind of commitment, and I found that commitment changed the quality of arrival. He was not going to return to his ordinary life in two hours. The ordinary life was a plane flight away. What that produced in the room was something I noticed as a quality of availability—the specific ease of a person who does not need to be anywhere else for a significant period.
What I found across those longer sessions was something I want to stay with rather than summarise, because the summary would lose the texture of it. A man who arrived for a two-hour session and who had been in the room for perhaps forty minutes would sometimes say something during the third hour that he had not said in the first. Not because the first hour had been withheld from, but because he had not yet found the footing—that is the phrase that occurs to me—to say the thing. The finding of the footing took time. It required the earlier hours to exist. The thing he said in the third hour was sometimes the thing he had come to say all along without knowing it, and he could not have said it at the beginning because the beginning was still the beginning.
Time, when it is not being used to get somewhere, produces this. I noticed it first in the massage itself—the way a muscle that has been held in tension for long enough that it has forgotten how to release will sometimes release in the final minutes of a session, when the surrounding tissue has been so thoroughly worked that there is nothing left to hold it. The late release in a massage and the late disclosure in a longer session felt, to me, related. Both required the earlier work to have been done, and both arrived when the arrival was no longer forced.
The overnight sessions carried a different quality again, which arose simply from the fact of sleeping. Two people in proximity through the night, the unconscious adjacency of sleeping bodies, the particular strangeness of waking in a room with someone you met the previous afternoon—these produced something I found consistently hard to predict. Some men woke into ease. Some woke into a quality of thought that they hadn’t brought to bed with them.
What seemed consistent was that the morning conversation was different from the evening one—not better or worse, but shaped differently by what the night had held. Men said things in the morning that the evening had not produced.
What I thought about, across the years of offering these longer durations, was the relationship between time and what time makes available. A session of one hour offered one quality of encounter. A session of three hours offered another. A day offered another still.
Each extension did not simply add more of the same—it seemed to change the kind of thing that could happen, as though the additional time altered the nature of the space rather than merely extending its duration. Whether this is true in any general sense I cannot say. I am describing what I found in these specific sessions with these specific men.
What I found was that time, when it drifted rather than ran, tended to produce something that running time could not.
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