When I handed the junk food cashier cash tonight to pay for my fries she read the word on my wrist aloud. I winced because it’s still puzzling that something done in such a private moment of pain is this banal little scribble that any one, cashier or politician, can point to and comment on. Of course this was always why I was wary of tattoos because they are ultimately banal, feckless little acts of rebellion (or conformity).
But I’ve come to cherish this little totem of personal mythology permanently branded on my wrist. I tend to stare at it the most in the shower, when the beaded water exaggerates one of the letters; when naked in that blissful solitude you gather your strength to face whatever indignities await you once clothed. Sometimes I will put two fingers over it to see what the word ‘rage’ would look like on me.
Last night, I dreamed that I had it removed. In its place was a nasty purple scar like that of a burn mark that made me feel ugly and uneasy. I imagine this neurotic phantasm was because the person who held my hand when my hand while I got this thing permanently put on me — a person I was simply mad about, who held me in the heights of a delirious infatuation, whose punishing lows I revisit too often— regarded me with absolute indifference recently. Like I was a speck.
To think of that?
Perhaps it’s because tattooing is regarded with such a cavalier attitude today or maybe because I’m overly sentimental, or for a thousand other good reasons, I found the whole blow off astonishing. It caused a sobbing session in a hotel room very far away from any one I could depend on which is an awful feeling, one, if I’m honest about, I haven’t quite recovered from. I don’t know if I’ve recovered from the gigantic forces that compelled me to get this bloody thing put on me in the first place. Courage, indeed.
