something about a tattoo

We do the conventional greeting with complaints about the communication with our moms. I pick a drawing and try it on as I learn they’re from California, about their ideas on what that means, that they’re comfortable sharing with strangers. Then I’ll sit facing them, their art stenciled on my arm and now there’s hours ahead of us, so where to go from here…

They’re heartbroken. They found an incredible connection in someone but they’re states, and maybe stages, away; and the other doesn’t feel quite the same: not ready to move around for it, not into singling out. They’re incredulous with the unrequited, as well the thought of sharing, of not having—of what to do with a love like that.

They’re reading Alan Watts’ Wisdom of Insecurity for understanding. My fucking love for Alan Watts, the first author to change my life. They say it’s about how anxiety is just insecurity; how our safety is separateness, the very thing that makes us insecure; that maintaining security and baiting insecurity is all the same thing. After all, how do we reconcile attachment; what about not getting what we want, how do we trust that it’s enough?

Their problem is familiar. It’s like we meet people and they become special to us, but, if we keep ourselves open, it happens again and again. And as they do the same, the tension wanes, the world relaxes. Soon enough the special is everywhere and could be anywhere. “It comes down to how you want to spend your time,” repeating something someone told me recently. [Later, I read Watts’ point to become the insecurity, as life flows always in flux between moment to moment.]

In some broken silence they say, “I just wish they lived here.” And I tell them I wish they lived here, too, and we share a glance in recognition, a nod of encouragement. They bring up The Will to Change (hooks, 2004) while showing me some favorite music. It’s not Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, John Prine, but someone else; a song about a dirty room. I notice our aloneness in the studio, the big windows and the natural light, the two couches on either end—just as a similar thought seems to occur to them, too.