In Which We Can't Go On We'll Go On

The Body

by ANAÏS MATHERS

Ghosts do not happen alone. Ghosts are made

from rooms and glass and cherry trees. They lie down and become

horizons. You see by them.

You remember.

- C. Dylan Bassett

My mother was fifteen when my aunt was born, an only child through and through by the time she got the sibling she spent most of her early childhood asking for. My aunt was ten when she was the flower girl in my mother’s wedding and thirteen when I was born in late 1986. There’s a photo of her holding me in my nursery, her hair permed, her gangly limbs all-akimbo. Each of us grew up an only child, an only daughter. My mother had hoped I would be a boy for my grandfather’s sake but he was thrilled to have another little girl in the family, especially when I was born with the same birthmark on my waist that my great-grandfather had. It was all us girls and my aunt and I, we were thick as thieves from the start.

She was my aunt but we were also sisters. When my mom was running late, my aunt would pick me up from school and let me sit on her lap and steer while she drove. When my parents went out of town, she let me watch every movie they refused to let me watch and slept in my bed with me when those movies inevitably terrified me. When she moved to Chicago for a job, I spent weeks visiting her during summer vacation. We ate good food and awful food, stayed up late, and watched TV shows that would become favorites of mine: Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The summer before I started high school she drank with me in her apartment so I would know how terrible I’d feel the next day. I still haven’t met anyone as cool as her.

My parents got divorced when I was fifteen and she was the only person I wanted to talk to about it. She left her job, moved back to Florida, and started her life over to be closer to me. She was still my sister then but she was also my friend and, most importantly, my mother. She got me a dog to help cheer me up, she bought my dresses for every homecoming dance and prom I went to, she made sure I went and that I didn’t let my heart harden that early. When I started having sex, she was the first person I told and she got me on the pill right away. She packed me up for college and sat on the phone with me as I cried about my first broken heart. She understood when I needed to take time away from school to just sort of be for a while. She made sure I grew up and she made sure I knew what loving someone meant.

I was almost twenty-two when she found out her kidneys were failing. She had always had health problems, having been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes when she was a baby, but this was different. I got tested along with the rest of my family to see if any of us were a match but none of us were; I was devastated. She was put on a transplant list and started dialysis. I moved back to the city I was raised in order to be close to her. When I could, I’d go to dialysis with her. We watched episodes of Hannah Montana and tried to figure out how it ever became a show. I put blankets on her when she was cold and folded them up when she got hot. We talked for hours while a machine made her kidneys function. She kept getting weaker but she kept traveling, doing all the things she loved, until she absolutely couldn’t. She still wanted to but her body was a lemon.

Two years after she was diagnosed, her body was done. She had a stroke the day before she was supposed to have surgery to put a stent in her heart. I wasn’t there when it happened, I was writing a paper for class; she didn’t wake up again. I went to the hospital the next day and saw the machines making her breathe; it was just a body, she wasn’t there. I kept repeating that, that she wasn’t there, until my grandfather pulled me out of the room before I upset my grandmother. I threw up in a trashcan in the hallway. I left that day and didn’t come back for two weeks, not until the day she was to be taken off life support.

It was a Saturday morning and family and friends cleared the room when I arrived. Her fingertips had started to turn black from lack of circulation and her skin felt cool and papery; she was already beginning to get stiff. The machines made her chest rise and fall but she was gone in the ways that counted. I tweezed her eyebrows, which had grown in over the past few weeks, knowing how meticulous she always was about them. When it came time to turn off the machines, I wept with my family and held her in my arms. The nurse looked at me.

“If she hears you sobbing like that, she won’t go,” she said. “I’ve seen it before.”

It took everything inside me, but I quieted myself somehow. I knew that it was just her body but I couldn’t let go of even that, of the hope that she would suddenly open her eyes. Her heart was at 40 BPM and as soon as I quieted down, it dropped to zero. It was over.

I watched the nurse remove the monitoring devices while my grandparents cried. I signed the required paperwork and made arrangements for her cremation. I watched them put a sheet over her body and stared at the familiar form, all at once strange to me. She looked so still and I couldn’t remember a time she had been that still in life. I wasn’t afraid as much as I was very aware of the surreal nature of such a moment. I took my grandparents home and didn’t cry again until I was alone with the dog my aunt had given me years before.

She and I rewatched Buffy while she was sick. We stopped after Season 4, making excuses as to why but both of us aware of what we were avoiding. We didn’t want to watch Buffy’s mom get sick and die in Season 5, we had seen it before and knew what was coming. Buffy’s mom, Joyce, recovers from her brain tumor only to pass away from a brain aneurysm a short while later. It was mundane yet earth shattering by Buffy standards. After all that time, it wasn’t a demon or vampire that took Buffy’s mom away but something she couldn’t fight. I remember how small I felt the first time I watched that but I had no idea what it actually felt like.

I began rewatching Buffy recently, finding myself as in love with it as I was as a kid and teenager but with the understanding and hindsight that comes with a decade more of living. I watched Joyce get sick and I watched her get better; I waited for what was coming. I watched “The Body” and waited for Buffy to find her mom’s body, to realize the finality of this loss, to see her change in a moment. I watched everyone else’s grief and felt my own as fresh as the day it happened. I didn’t expect it to feel that raw just like I never expect it to feel that raw whenever it hits me.

I remember my godfather passing away when I was ten. I remember crying because I was scared that someone would make me go near the body. I cried so hard during the service that my dad had to carry me out of the church and calm me down outside. I had nightmares for weeks about the body I hadn’t had to see, my mind creating a terrifying unknown. This was my first experience with death and yet not one at all; his death at a very elderly age seemed to make sense to me then but what was left behind to decompose, that’s what got me.

My aunt’s body never scared me though, maybe because I was older and better equipped to handle seeing it or because I knew her so well and loved her so much. It was heart-wrenching, it was surreal, it was odd, but it was never scary. I think that I just knew that a 37-year-old dying was so much worse, that the permanent loss of someone you love was terrifying. The most commonly mentioned highlight of “The Body” is ex-demon Anya’s honest questions about death and how it just makes no sense. It didn’t make sense and it never does. I will tell you almost three years later, and I suspect it will always be the case, that death will never make sense.

Some people become adults over time through a bunch of experiences that seem to slowly acclimate them to whatever it means to grow up. For some of us, it happens very suddenly and after you can pinpoint the exact moment you became an adult: Buffy grew up the instant her mom died, I grew up the instant my aunt died. My grief was mighty and I woke up every day for almost a year believing it would kill me and that I would never get through it only to find that I was doing just that. Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” looped endlessly in my head then. It got easier over time but it never dulled, it never stopped hurting. Even now, it’ll hit me suddenly and it feels as bad as the day it happened. I don’t know that time heals all wounds so much as that it fills your life so much that you seem to sometimes forget that the most terrible thing has happened to you.

You don’t forget though. I’ve made peace with what’s happened, stopped trying to make sense of such a senseless thing as death. It’s not death that haunts me but the memory, the living, the things that came before it all ended. It’s the knowledge and absence of what I’ve lost that hurts the most; this is my ghost. It never stops hurting, the big losses never do; it becomes a part of your bones. It rips you apart and leaves you to figure out what to do next. This ghost has informed how I choose to live, what I do, how I love. You will ache and you will hurt but you will be feeling, remembering not just the pain but how much love there was and how much there still is; death can never touch that. 

Anaïs Mathers is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in South Florida. She last wrote in these pages about falling in love alone. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Only Tomorrow" - My Bloody Valentine (mp3)

"In Another Way" - My Bloody Valentine (mp3)

In Which We Fell In Love Alone

This Isn't About Now

by ANAÏS MATHERS

I got food poisoning the day before my kindergarten class’s Valentine’s Day party. I was very disappointed that I didn’t get to bring the heart-shaped Jell-o Jigglers my mom grudgingly made and that I couldn’t open my construction paper mailbox full of valentines. Instead, I stayed in my mom’s bed eating Jell-o Jigglers and complaining incessantly about my stomach pains and how I was missing the party. My mom eventually put me in the car in my pajamas and slippers and took me to Toys ‘R Us.

“You can pick anything you want,” she said. “Just please be quiet for a little while.”

She pushed the cart down every aisle but we both knew where we’d end up: the Barbie aisle. Since I could pick anything I wanted, I went for the one thing my mom would never let me get: the whole Midge bridal doll set with Barbie and Skipper as bridesmaids and whatnot. A flicker passed over my mom’s expression as she realized her mistake but she kept her word; I had them all out of the box by the time we reached the register. I loved the whole set but Midge’s wedding dress was of little interest to me. I had her in the lavender and white polka dot bon voyage honeymoon outfit for the rest of the time I owned her. And that’s the most excited I’ve ever been about bridal wear my entire life.

I think of weddings and their many details the way I think of the Real Housewives franchises: fascinating and delicious but ultimately terrifying. I tried to pinpoint exactly when I stopped wanting a big traditional wedding but I don’t think I ever had the urge for it the way many of my friends did and do. I hoped I’d fall in love and have the kind of 50+ year marriage my grandparents have but my parents’ bitter divorce when I was 14 made me understand that if I did get married, it might not last. I was wary, I was self-sabotaging, but I was definitely not deluding myself into wishing for that fairy tale day. I was so scared of marriage, so in awe of a commitment until death, that the wedding seemed to not even be a reality.

I knew I wanted to marry my husband Ian as soon as I met him. I was the girl and then woman who believed there was a relationship equation, a series of steps to prove if you were really meant to be with someone. I thought you had to live with someone for two years, that you would not know you loved them for at least a year into things, that marriage shouldn’t even be on the table until three years in. This kind of thinking led me to date my ex-boyfriend longer than I have been with my husband total so far. I don’t think I need to tell you that I was full of shit. It’s one thing to not be ready to be in a relationship with someone but when you know about a person, you just know.

Ian proposed over the summer with a slightly smaller than 1 carat grey diamond and we were thrilled. I quickly learned how weird people get about engagements and marriages. I got so many questions and comments about the ring, why I chose it, why I did not want something bigger or flashier, how “quirky” and “unique” I am. So many acquaintances stared blankly at me when I expressed that I did not really like traditional diamonds, especially ones that aren’t conflict free, and that I could not imagine asking Ian to spend three months’ salary on a ring. I could feel them judging both of us both based on this and felt sad in general about the materialism involved with joining your life with someone else’s.

Things calmed down after a few weeks and we set about planning our wedding. We call it our wedding because it is but technically, we eloped. Early on in our relationship, we were both shocked to find out the other didn’t really want a big wedding at all, what with the tendency for it to become a circus and a source of stress. We had both expected to compromise when we met the person we wanted to marry, to work out a middle ground of sorts; instead, we got exactly what we wanted. We were terrified to tell our families but they were surprisingly understanding about the whole thing. I can’t tell you that there weren’t moments when some or all of them expressed frustration at the situation but I can say that we have what are probably the kindest, most respectful parents in the entire world. They are also glad that there will be a family wedding celebration of sorts in the future.

We wanted a neutral location so there would not be temptation for anyone’s family to crash the day and I had an itching for New York City. There is no more beautiful place in the fall and the actual process of getting married there is very simple. We booked our flights and a hotel room for a week. My mom bought my $40 wedding dress and kept checking to see if I wanted something fancier; Ian’s dad bought him a $200 blazer that looked very dapper on him. We ordered a bouquet of paper roses and peonies made of maps of Florida and Ontario and pages from our favorite books, Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. We also made a blog for family and friends to keep up with our day, picked some wedding announcements for after the fact, and created a mix of our favorite love songs for our day. Other than that and asking a friend to be our witness, it was pretty much just us showing up.

I spent a lot of time explaining to people why I did not want a wedding: I could not see the point of spending the money for my second cousin to eat prime rib, I couldn’t see the point of putting myself through an expensive and stressful situation for my family’s sake, that I didn’t really want to read our very personal vows in front of my grandma, among others. People could almost understand these reasons but they stared at me blankly when I told them I wanted our wedding day to be ours, that I wanted it to be a day and memory that was about our coming together. We fell in love alone and so why wouldn’t we want to get married that way? I was fine with celebrating with family at some later point but I would not budge on having this one day be the way we wanted.

I am an emotional person but I was overly emotional in the month leading up to the wedding. I was full of expectation and joy in a way I had never experienced, crying as we filled out our marriage license application online two weeks before our wedding and as we watched Hurricane Sandy pound the city on the news; I realized I made the best choice in husband when Ian calmed me down and called our hotel and the City Clerk’s Office to make sure everything was OK. I wrote my vows in a notebook on the plane, tearing up as I tried to promise all the things I wasn’t even sure life would bring but I promised them anyways.

As we rode the E train from JFK into Manhattan on a Sunday, I squeezed Ian’s hand and realized that the last time I had been in New York was exactly two years before. I had left my ex-boyfriend after a long, difficult relationship and the death of my aunt and checked myself into a hotel to eat room service and drink away my pain. I left the city thinking I would never come back and if I did, it would not be for good reason. I thought about how I truly believed my life was over and I could not imagine anything good happening to me ever again. I thought about how I had no idea then what was coming and even if I could tell myself that then, I would not have believed it until it happened. You have no idea the rest of your life is starting when it is.

We went to the City Clerk’s Office on a rainy Tuesday morning, waited twenty minutes, paid $35, and got our marriage license. My face hurt from smiling and we tucked the license inside my purse on our way to get breakfast. That night, alone in our hotel room, we sat face to face on the bed and read each other the vows we had written. We were both emotional and held each other for a long time. As far as we were concerned, we were married right then and there, really, had been from the moment we laid eyes on each other but we went to bed for our ceremony in the morning.

I woke up early and did my own hair and makeup. I put on my short ivory dress, dove grey fascinator and veil, mustard yellow tights, and a pale grey bubble necklace. I wore jewelry from my mom, grandma, aunt, and mother-in-law and red-orange lipstick. Ian wore jeans, a Swans shirt, and the blazer; we both wore Chucks. We took the 6 train downtown and got lots of quiet grins from people who realized we were getting married. We met our friend at the City Clerk’s Office and soon they called our number. After signing the marriage certificate and paying $25, we waited in a little foyer with a handful of other couples waiting to be married, a situation of contagious joy and the comforting yet humbling feeling that you are so, so small in the big picture.

Soon we were called into the chapel. The man who married us had a booming voice that made me shake each time he spoke. I grinned the whole time but I didn’t come close to crying as much as I expected to. It was over quickly but we got the feeling that despite doing this hundreds of times a day, this man was happy for us. We texted our families and close friends pictures as we jumped in a cab with our witness and headed to Pies ‘n’ Thighs for brunch. They were thrilled for us, too, and put little hearts made of potato and tomato on our chicken biscuit plates and sent us home with free pie.

We fielded a bunch of calls and messages from our loved ones but aside from that, the day was ours. We napped, we had dinner and drinks, we went to a concert in Brooklyn. We had a pretty regular day except for the fact that we got married. It was the best, most important day of my life so far and it was easy, it was entirely us. The day went fast, the whole month since we got married has gone fast.

The thing is, I am not trying to tell you to do what we did, what I am trying to tell you is that you do not have to do anything you don’t actually want to do; the bridesmaids' dresses do not all have to be the same length and color, there do not even have to be bridesmaids. On the other hand, if you want fifteen ladies in taffeta at your side, that’s more than OK, too. It is not your job to make anyone besides you and your partner happy, what you have to remember is what you are in it for. A wedding is not a marriage, not even close. It is just the first day of the rest of your unwritten life.

Anaïs Mathers is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in South Florida. She last wrote in these pages about removing her tattoos. She tumbls here and twitters here.

Photographs by the author.

"Memories Can't Wait" - Talking Heads (mp3)

"This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" - Talking Heads (mp3)

In Which She Did Not Rip The Pages Out

photo by kate hiscock

Sleeveless

by ANAÏS ESCOBAR

A few weeks ago, I woke up on Monday morning and hit snooze a few times before finally getting out of bed. Between work and school, I have six-day weeks these days, by which I mean the next eight months until my program’s over. I checked my messages because there’s always a tweet or email or text that comes in while I’m sleeping, and I checked my calendar as I always do even when I know the only thing listed lately will be work or school. Work was there, but so was something I had forgotten about: my tattoo removal appointment.

Forgetting was surprising because I’ve had this appointment every month for the past four years, barring one six month stretch a year or so when I stopped going. Once a month I’d get an alert on my phone the morning of the appointment and I’d remember to wear something sleeveless under my cardigan; this made for easier access to the tattoos on my arm. I’d sit and read in the waiting room while I waited for my appointment. Everyone else around me would be waiting for plastic surgery consultations, women telling the friends they dragged with them that they should get a consultation, too, that they would look great with bigger breasts or smaller thighs. I’d keep my eyes down and try not to think about my own thighs until they called my name and I’d follow the nurse back to the exam room.

They make you wear glasses to protect your eyes from the lasers. I try not to think about what they’re doing to my skin but I suppose that’s the whole point of this. I’ve had four different nurses who have done this procedure on me in this place and this one is the most polite. She hands me a hose attached to a machine that produces very cold air and I hold it over my skin, alternating between the two tattoos being removed. She doesn’t talk much because there’s nothing to say. I press my molars together as she begins tracing my tattoos with lasers; first one for the black then different ones for the different colors. It doesn’t hurt as much as the first time I had the treatment but it still hurts more than when I got tattooed. When she’s done, my faded tattoos are swollen and red. She puts antibiotic cream and gauze on them and schedules my next appointment. I receive the next appointment as a text to my phone and I leave; afterwards, I always cry in the car.

What only those who are close to me really notice is that I haven’t worn anything sleeveless in four years. I make excuses about not liking how my arms look or feeling cold but that has little to do with it. It has to do with a kind of heavy heart and shame that come with feeling scarred, with the visible reminders of how you fucked up along the way. I put on long sleeves and cardigans over every dress, every tank top as soon as I came home.

No one expected me to be a prodigal daughter. I got straight A’s in high school, I participated in every extracurricular activity, I got into every college I applied to. I did all this but I was angry and even more than that, I was depressed. Depressed about my parents’ divorce and their selfishness in the wake of it, depressed about everything. I went away to school and fell apart but I didn’t tell anyone right away; the answer would have been, “you should sleep more, Anaïs, are your grades ok?” Our relationship always hung delicately on my belief that I could be, but wasn’t, enough. My grades, along with everything else, were definitely not ok.

I withdrew from school for a few semesters for medical reasons, not telling my parents at first and depositing the tuition refund I received into my bank account. Even most of my friends didn’t know I wasn’t enrolled in school anymore. I laid low, working now and then, mostly trying to feel closer to how everyone else seemed to feel; I didn’t. I drove through a lot of the continental US and I flew to different cities with my tuition refund. When I ran out of money for rent or for anything, my family helped me out but they didn’t want to talk to me. I had rough sex in an attempt to feel something and when that stopped being enough, I got tattooed.

The first tattoo I got was a black heart on the inside of my left wrist followed soon after by a wonky star in between my shoulder blades, done by an ex-boyfriend in our bedroom with India ink and instructions from a zine. The heart remains, but the star was covered two years later by a hamsa. Another friend apprenticing to be a tattoo artist gave me a delicate blue butterfly on my ribs that is barely bigger than a quarter. Sometimes I’ll forget that one is still there and catch a glimpse of it in the mirror, brushing at it before I realize that it’s not going anywhere.

The two tattoos on my arm are the stubborn ones, the ones I’ve been removing, the ones that have faded but not disappeared. One is the outline of a 1950s era woman holding a pistol. I saw it on a patch this girl in my queer theory class had that said, “Not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you.” I loved it. I tracked down the image and sat with two friends as it was permanently etched onto my inner arm. A few months later, I had an Andy Warhol sketch of an ice cream cone tattooed on the outer part of the same arm. I had a print of this exact ice cream cone in my room growing up, a gift from my parents. They might not have been talking to me but I was trying to talk to them. I didn’t wear sleeves yet.

I eventually got tired of being everywhere and nowhere at once and I moved home. Despite my grades, I transferred to a college near my hometown and found myself living with my grandparents. They knew about my tattoos from visiting me during a hospital visit a few months before but didn’t mention them for almost two months. We pretended everything was fine. We circled each other that summer and I never took off a cardigan around them. I even wore a zip up jacket to the gym every day. It was finally mentioned when my shirt slid off my shoulder while I read a book on the couch.

“What’s on your arm?” My grandmother frowned.

“What do you think it is?” I snapped.

She didn’t say anything but she didn’t have to: she was disappointed. She left the room and came back with my grandfather who also already knew about my tattoos but pretended to be newly surprised and concerned. It was then I realized that not only had I changed; their love had changed. I heard them later that night on the phone telling my parents about the tattoos, about how they never expected this of me. I slept in a long sleeve t-shirt that night.

I’m from South Florida and so it was easy to find a plastic surgeon that offered tattoo removal. I had my consultation with a very blond woman who poked around at my tattoos. She told me they should come off in a year or two at most and we could begin as soon as possible. She clicked her tongue at my ice cream cone, my lady with a pistol.

“Such a pretty girl,” she said. “Shame.”

“She’s not like that,” my grandmother replied. “I don’t understand what happened.”

I sat like a specimen pinned to a dissection pad and pulled up my sleeve. I started to cry and they both patted me on the back, telling me I was still beautiful, that I would be again. I told them I wanted to begin as soon as possible. I wanted my family to adore me again, I wanted that part of my life erased; I just wanted to feel whole again or perhaps for the first time. My grandmother wrote a check for almost $4000, which would cover removal indefinitely, until the tattoos were entirely gone. As we left, I hugged my grandmother on the elevator.

My first appointment was the very next day. I wore something sleeveless under my jacket and sat upright in the exam room. They told me the first session would be the most painful while I was holding the hose of cold air on my skin. I nodded and put on the protective glasses and closed my eyes as well. I kept them shut tight as they began the procedure. It hit; it hurt more than I can express, more than the original tattoos, more than any other pain I’ve ever experienced. Tears streamed down my face as it went on for twenty minutes, the lasers breaking up the pigment of the ink for the body to push out. My arm swelled to twice its size by the time it was over. The nurse asked me if I was ok as she bandaged my arm and I could barely nod. I cradled my arm inside my jacket as I drove home.

I spent the next four days in bed as my body pushed ink out of me. I had a fever for two of those days and blistering, bleeding pain for all of them. Most of the time, I laid very still and looked at the ceiling trying to remember that I did this to myself, that I would be enough soon. The next month’s appointment hurt slightly less, as each one did over time and the tattoos started to fade. I started classes at the college I had transferred to and I focused for the first time in my college career. I got excellent grades, I got my GPA up, I participated in extracurricular activities, I did what I was supposed to do. I was still unhappy, I hadn’t beat that yet, but this time around, no one could tell. If they could, no one cared because I seemed fine.

When friends asked why I wanted to suddenly remove my tattoos, I told them I had been too rash in getting them, that I was young and stupid. I showed the tattoos to them as they started to fade. Men I dated saw them when I undressed for the first time, surprised I hadn’t mentioned them before. They ran their fingers and lips over the faded lines and I always pulled them away. I tried to think of them as not there at all but of course they were. You don’t try to cover up something that’s not there. Some people I know didn’t know for years that I had them.

I can tell you that they’ve faded. Black lines are now soft grey-green ones, the bright oranges, pinks, yellows are now pastels, smudged onto my skin. My family seems to have forgotten that I’m having them removed at all. Perhaps their shock has softened or maybe they’ve realized that tattoos have little to do with who I am. I graduated from college, I got a job, I met the man I’m marrying in a few weeks, and still, every month I went to my appointment. My tattoos are still there. I stopped being able to explain why I wanted them removed; I wasn’t at all sure why or if I wanted them removed at all. At my last appointment, I stopped the nurse as she switched lasers and asked when she thought these would be done. She looked pensive for a minute.

“I don’t know that these will ever be done,” she told me.

I let her complete the procedure and I made the appointment for the next month. I didn’t think about what she said until the morning I woke up and realized I didn’t want to do it anymore.

Something changed along the way. I’m not sure if it’s that I realized that my family loved me regardless of the choices I’d made or if I was just at a place where I was ok regardless. Maybe it’s just that I became ok with the choices I made. When I met my fiancé, I casually mentioned I was getting tattoos removed and when he asked me why, I couldn’t explain it. I told him what I had been saying for years and he left it alone. The first time we made love, he ran his fingers and lips over my faded ink and I didn’t stop him. I’m not sure if I was finally ready for that or if he made me ready for it but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

I didn’t call to cancel the last appointment; I just didn’t go. They never called me to follow up and so it is. Those tattoos weren’t going anywhere and even if they had, would they have really? Can you erase entire chapters of your life? Rewrite what happened? You can’t really if you’re being honest with yourself at all. I drank coffee outside my office the morning I decided to stop trying to remove parts of myself and I stood content with who I’ve become as well as all my past versions. I wanted to hug the girl who couldn’t talk to her family, who ran like hell to get away from herself, who thought through some kind of magical thinking that you could save yourself by giving yourself up, by punishing yourself. The fuller my life became, the more comfortable I became in my own skin, the less I wanted to change the past.

I don’t regret getting those tattoos any more than I regret trying to get them removed. I’ve learned to respect where I was as much as where I am, to realize that you can’t have one without the other. They’re just there for now, half gone but there. I have plans to perhaps cover one of them, not out of shame or a feeling of not being enough but from a place where I am actively making choices about my life. If I don’t, that’s my choice, too. I wore a tank top around a newer friend recently and she stopped in the middle of conversation to look at my arm. She asked if I meant for it to look like that. I smiled at her. I guess that I did.

Anaïs Escobar is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in South Florida. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Spectacular Views" - Rilo Kiley (mp3)

"Paint's Peeling" - Rilo Kiley (mp3)

"Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1" - The Mountain Goats (mp3)