I feel your burning eyes
I accept and I collect upon my body the memories of your devotion.
-Antony & the Johnsons
I’ve been talking and thinking a lot about scars lately. I don’t really know why, things seem fine on the surface. Maybe it was my childhood, I was an only child and an only grandchild on my mom’s side, and I was treated like a tiny fragile bird. That’s what girls are after all. Any time I’d attempt to climb a tree and do something unsafe like attempting to skateboard, my family would automatically put a stop to it. Don’t get me wrong. I was a kid who also enjoyed dolls and wearing dresses and being girly but there was this overwhelming attempt to shelter me from everything. I never got those childhood badges of courage that other kids get except accidentally now and then. I have scars from mosquito bites and a tiny scar on my hand from when a firework landed on my hand on the 4th of July when I was almost two.
I think I have a desire for the visual, I like seeing the results of something in front of me. When I write something, no matter the audience or format, I always print it out to have it physically tangible. I feel guilty for killing trees with all my printing but I can’t help it. I need the evidence of an experience gone through or created right in front of me. I need to feel it, I need to look in the mirror and see it.
As an adult, I’ve earned my own badges of courage like that gash in the pool and the seemingly innocuous fall in front of the bagel shop a few years ago; it was nothing but I still have a perfectly round scar on my left kneecap. I’ve never worn leg makeup nor wanted to, if my legs are visible, you may notice everything on them, faded to a soft pinkish white. Maybe you’ll see slight stretchmarks on my hips from when I grew into them during puberty.
You’ll definitely see the self-inflicted badges of courage. I got a few tattoos with a broken, heavy heart in my throat. Only the first one was completely joyous at the time; he tattooed a star in between my shoulderblades with india ink in our bedroom. I felt his hands on my back and the tiny prick of the needle as blood dripped, following the curve of my spine. At that moment, nothing seemed more perfect and true. It was beautiful, a hollow star, burned out on my skin.
It was only when he left and we broke that it became a burden. I noticed the star’s legs were slightly wonky. Everyone asked about it, touching my back without asking permission when I wore a backless shirt. My next lover was not understanding. She was insecure and jealous of this physical bond with my past, and felt threatened by a ghost seemingly bigger than her and I. It should have been my first sign of something awry with her. I was sick of carrying this around on my back, having it speak before I even opened my mouth. I tore a much-loved image off my bedroom wall and took it to a local tattoo artist. He said he couldn’t cover it. The next artist I visited said the same thing. I finally found someone who would cover it and made an appointment. As a side note, I’ll say that this was a glorious day because I lost something but gained something new: I met my best friend, Heidi.
Regardless, when I arrived for my appointment, I was ready. I wore a blue bra and my red hoodie on backwards, zipped up my back so he could work on the space in between my shoulderblades. I straddled a very comfortable chair and lowered my head. He placed the transfer of the image of a hamsa, a talisman of protection in both Muslim and Jewish cultures, on my back. It peeled off cool and wet and I prepared myself. The first line of a tattoo hurts the most and then your adrenaline kicks in. Some people spend the whole time getting a tattoo in pain but I’m the opposite, it’s pleasurable. I have a high pain threshold but I must have messed up wiring because I get off on that kind of pain. He drilled and soon I just rested my head and let the soothing vibrations lull me into a state of bliss.
My girlfriend soon arrived to sit with me during the tattoo and she looked smug. I could see all over her face that she thought she had won. I wanted to slap that look off her face. I wanted her to understand that this had nothing to do with her and everything to do with me. The look in her eyes made me realize that no matter how hard we tried, it would never work; she was too small, too weak of a person to ever be with and be truly myself with. If she was threatened by the past and only interested in covering things up and rewriting history, how would she face the future? I rested my face in my arms and let the man with tattooed knuckles drill a new image into my back for over three hours. My girlfriend and I went home. I slept in pain on my stomach that night. After two weeks, the tattoo had scabbed over and healed. Two days after the last scab fell off in the shower and two days before Valentine’s Day, I asked my girlfriend to move out. I gave her back her ring as she almost slammed my bedroom door off its hinges.
The hamsa covered the star well and I liked to believe that it protected me from the evil eyes of my girlfriend and everyone else who would have liked to see me dead at that time in my life. I don’t know if it protected me in the ways I expected but it helped me start what would be a new life. Like I said, I met one of my dearest friends, one of my soulmates, and I remembered what it was like to live a life for myself. I carried something new between my shoulderblades but my back was straighter; it was heavier than before but my shoulders were straight back and I lifted my past easily. Eventually the star began to show through a bit and I felt it was appropriate. You can’t escape anything in life, especially not old love. You’ll always carry that with you no matter how you try to forget, it will always be there; it’s how you carry it and how you deal with the past that matters. It’s as if love is something ever evolving. Once created, it may change form but the tangible emotion will always live between two people as something linking them by their guts, a pull or a push that keeps them orbiting each other whether they know it or not.
A while after I covered it, he and I saw each other again, and one thing led to another. As we were lying on the floor afterwards, my neck marked by his mouth, his back scratched by my nails, I turned onto my side and he noticed that I had covered it. I tensed a little bit, wondering if he would be angry that I tried to erase him. Instead, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to it.
“It’s still there,” he said, with his mouth to my back. “I can see it.” His eyes burned into my back and I let it go. It was his now. I slept easily on that floor.
