Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Remember, Remember

Over the last several years, I've developed a stock answer to the question of what any or all of my tattoos mean.

"Get me drunk and I'll tell you," I say, with a smile, though I've no intention of doing so.

It isn't because I don't like you or trust you, and it isn't because I'm especially insular and secretive. It isn't even because of the slightly condescending tone in which this question is usually asked, as if the matter in question were akin to a notebook of mawkish poetry any right-minded person would take a giant shit on.

It's because I didn't get them for you.

My reason for participating in what is, without context, a remarkably strange ritual, is expression. A different form from my writing, sure, but with a similar motive. Outwardly manifesting how I'm feeling - telling stories, ridding myself of the things that gnaw at me in various ways - is therapeutic for me. I like to define my hopes and especially my fears, to give them shape and bring them into the light.

In a lot of ways, my tattoos are memorials, markers for who and where I've been at the various stages of my life that really seemed to matter, from a boy of eighteen with a simple star that stood for simple feelings to a man of thirty-four looking for a way to somehow express a decade-long, continent-spanning tale of love, loss, and self-discovery. How do I explain that in a way that fits the conversation, that fits you and I in a bar, a chance reveal of the Latin phrase written on the inside of my wrist?

Auribus tenere lupum, it reads - I hold a wolf by the ears. Above this, a stylized design of the animal in question, its flank adorned by three stars, the second of which is the simple thing I asked for in a shop in King's Lynn seventeen years ago, incorporated into the newer design, new meaning layered over old, growing, evolving. Not a sentence. Not even a paragraph. There are years in those lines, feelings, experiences, clumsy slices of life, a thing almost indefinable if you aren't the one that lived it.

And you ask me what it means. Nothing. Everything. To borrow another Latin phrase, res ipsa loquitor - let the thing speak for itself. Let it mean whatever you think it means; I didn't get it for you.

If not what, then, I can tell you why. It's the permanence that speaks to me, scarring as art, a ritualistic closing of wounds and a romanticized reminder that those particular demons and the folks that conjured them are behind me, a part of the terrible and fantastic comet trail of experience that defines who I am now, far from home and with stories worth telling. posted at 9:49 PM ---------------------------------