Most days don’t feel like this.
I got a secret tattoo during a near-life experience. It is a mustached skull and crossbones. I happened upon it, and much like my near-death tattoo, it is a permanent reminder of a moment I may be better off forgetting.
For those unaware, the near-life experience is far more common than its better-known fraternal twin, the near-death experience. A near-life experience is a vacation to paradise, and your heart is full and happy without longing and with belonging, but it bleeds out coming home. It is every solacing hug from your soul mate, though never salacious because s/he is married to someone else. Someone wakes every morning to the light and lightness of that paradise, but it is not you. Someone watches every night as that soul mate’s pajama-ed leg disappears under the sheet, but it is not you. And without upending everything you have and know, it will never be you. And even if you in fact upend everything you have and know, it may still never be you. The banality of every moment outside this this stings or throbs.
I hate near-life experiences. They are taunting and demeaning. They are an unsettling hit to a high I wish I’d never reached. I feel kidnapped and returned with an obsession for finding the way back to my tormenter forever or a single moment. I struggle with allowing myself glimpses into things I want, a different job, a different city, because I’m not sure if it will be crushing or releasing. But when the glimpse is not only unavoidable but wholly engulfing, I find myself both crushed by the guilty pleasure and shot up by the high-flying swing of an honest joy.
In my mid-20s, I made up rules to minimize my living and maximize my life. I was easily distracted by near-life experiences, so I endeavored to cut them out. I set out to be an adult, problem-solve, handle my own business, grow roots deep and thick in the reality beneath me. I needed rules because I couldn’t intuit just when to adult, what problems needed solving, or what the hell my business was, let alone how to handle it.
So, as a certified adult by way of a W-2 or a W-4, maybe both, I made up a complex series of constrictions. I enforced them strictly on myself and my constituents (my husband and to some lesser extent my dog). These rules included religiously spending at least 5 minutes mapping out the single most efficient course of any action and never, never taking a taxi. (The latter always being factored into the former.)
Before I knew it, I had lots of rules. Where I would pick up my coffee on my walk to the train was no longer subject to taste but defined contingencies. It depended on how quickly I got to a particular corner, how long the line was at the first efficient option, etc. I was bound tightly to goals, metrics, schedules, and I increasingly accomplished more than even I thought possible within each day, week, month that rolled past me.
I was also pretty miserable.
By nature, breaking rules is more my thing. It was no surprise then that I began to find subtle but effective ways to suspend or defy them—my own arbitrary rules. For example, no rules applied in the air. On a plane, I allowed myself to curl up into ball in the middle of my seat. I wouldn’t do this otherwise, not in a car, on a bus, train or ferry, although the measure of the space I could have and the space I needed was more or less always the same. Only on a plane, I let myself drift off into an easy sleep, a difficult book, a place deep inside myself that is cocooned and fetal but wide and real all the same. But once I jetwayed back to my responsibilities, the rules snapped into place to facilitate success, actual and feigned.
The rules were hard for my husband, especially since he had no means of devising exceptions of his own. Things got ugly when he mentioned he was thinking of getting a certain tattoo. According to the rules, tattoos had to be meaningful and/or momentous. The problem was that my husband wanted a tattoo of something he just liked. It was not something offensive, nothing embarrassing or ugly, but flatly prohibited notwithstanding.
We fought for months. I couldn’t understand why he wanted such a random tattoo, a waste, a permanent depiction of nothing. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t simply have a thing he liked.
The stalemate was apparent while we boarded the plane to a long-awaited Hawaiian vacation. It continued despite the suspension of all rules during flight. On the island, I noted how happy I was not to see a useless tattoo on my spouse’s body whenever he applied sunscreen, and he laughed at me whenever chickens chased me around the pool.
To get the most of our vacation, I gathered a number of magazines, excursion brochures, and travel guides. I used them to book one daytime activity and one evening activity for each but one day of our weeklong trip. My husband hates being held to a schedule, so I assented to limited scheduled unscheduled-fun time.
One of the local highlights featured in the literature was Blue Tiki Tattoo. The artist, Uncle Tim, had won awards and was generally highly praised. “I’m going,” he said. “No, you aren’t,” I said back.
On his preordained day of rest, he drove us to a far away beach. On the way back, we passed Blue Tiki. He pulled into a parking lot.
I hissed, scrunched my nose, locked myself in the car, but ultimately followed him in because the temperature in the car threatened to exceed my hot head.
By the time I walked in, my husband was chatting it up with Uncle Tim, who was drawing. A second artist, an old man with a tremble visiting from San Francisco, sat across the room.
“How long is this going to take?” I asked.
“About two and a half hours,” said the old man. There was nothing but what appeared to be an incense shop two doors down in this mini-strip mall.
So, I returned to the tattoo shop and chatted with the old man.
“What don’t you like about his tattoo?” he asked.
“Tattoos should mean something. Mark an occasion, have a basis,” I said. It did not escape me that his arms were covered in dice, flowers, shapes, and other random objects in no discernible order.
“But if something makes you happy, doesn’t that mean something?”
“No.”
He asked me what I would tattoo if there were no rules, no consequences, and most importantly no judgment.
“A skull and crossbones,” my husband answered for me. My love for skull and crossbones is deep and known because it is easily knowable. I regularly wear blingy skull and crossbones earrings. Nothing cracks me up like the international symbol for poison. It is the simplest dread.
“WRONG,” I said. “I would get a skull and crossbones with a mustache because that would be hysterical,” I qualified.
“I’ve never drawn one with a mustache,” the old man said. “I think that’s really funny. Why don’t I draw one and see how you like it. No pressure. You don’t have to get it done or anything. We’re just sitting here.”
I let him draw it for me because he was very old and we were now aging together. When he was finished, he handed me the trace paper and I saw a reflection of myself. There it was. Something I never knew I needed. I could never be alive as a person without it.
He asked me what I thought of the drawing as I walked around the counter and plopped myself down on the tattoo table. We briefly debated its location, its size. When he wiped me down and shaved my skin, his hand shook. When he applied the trace, it shook worse. But the buzz of the needle soothed him. It shook out his shakes.
I lay flat and still on the table, dead to everything else. No rule, no efficiency, no careful responsibility could give me this this.
After he tattooed me, he showed me books that featured his work. He was famous. One of the first modern tattoo artists in the country, his techniques built instruction, developed trends, informed individual styles. His life’s work was to display people’s inner selves on their skin. Every day, he saw to it that someone brought the inside out, defined it with lines, put color to it, made it unhidden and undeniable. That day, just that day, that someone was me.
I’m conflicted because I defied good judgment and professionalism, went against the rules and was complicit with chaos. I ended up with a secret tattoo that is a lasting mark of the high in doing whatever I want when I want to do it. It is as it is for no other reason than I am as I am. Alive and unhidden in a secret hiding spot.