Friday Freewrite: Sharing is over-rated

tshirt available from www.semi-rad.comThe thing about having tattoos is that people have a lot of questions. And also a lot to say. Sometimes people just want to tell their own story. They want to connect. Other people just want to touch.

It’s a little like being perpetually pregnant, you know, in that way that pregnancy makes you everybody’s property, strangers laying hands on you, offering their unsolicited labor tales, their advice.

I’ve been this colorful way so long that it’s as if I was born like this. I forget all about it sometimes. Other times I cover myself because I can’t deal with the scrutiny.

What’s always interesting, though, about these unsolicited interactions is that they reveal so much about my interlocutor. It really has nothing whatsoever to do with me -- I’m just the prompt, even though it can feel a little more personal than that when I look down and see a strange man’s hands gripping my forearm.

Do I know you?

Recently I was having lunch with a friend in an impossibly noisy café. I was already feeling crazy from the din, from how far I had to lean in to the table to hear her words, how loud I had to speak to push my own words across to her – like this tiring game of verbal air hockey. It was a typical place for where we live, and I had already visually tallied the percentage of women in there (it was mostly women) employed exclusively in the home. You know the deal: ladies who lunch. Or really, to my eye, ladies with nothing better to do than work out, then meet friends for decaf and salad, still in their ponytails and matchy Lululemon outfits. And me, of course, watching the clock, knowing I have to get back to work. I felt a little harried, out of place.

Anyway, I must have had a sleeve pushed up, maybe two. I forget. It was warm out, and I was completely undone by the noise, my plate already a mess of deconstructed BLT, too-fat chunks of heirloom tomato pushed to the side for my friend to take home to her chickens.  She had just mentioned that she was thinking of getting her first tattoo. This is interesting because she’s my age, recently divorced, recently deliriously happy finally in a sustained way for the first time in forever – I like the idea of the tattoo as a marker of that passage, her painful but so-worth-it self-liberation. I really like that idea.

But right then, just as we’re about to dig in to the topic of which shop, who from, where on her body, I see out of the corner of my eye the guy at the next table who had, until that moment been entirely engrossed (so I thought) in his iPad, I see him leaning in, invading our conversation with his eyes. And then it came, to me:

Your artwork is beautiful. Who did it? Oh, I thought so. I got my work done there, too.

And we two ladies politely smiling, opened for the deluge.

He then proceeded to tell us not only the story of the tattoos he already had (and yes, we got to see them), but also the story of those to come, those only existing as drawings yet, as plans in his mind’s eye. We learned, by inference, that he’s divorced with two children, as one of the tattoos-to-be features his two kids in the roles of princess and white knight. We learned that his plan is to have his totem animals on him for protection, the wolf we were shown facing forward, the grizzly still-to-come facing outward from his back. His girlfriend doesn’t get it, he told us, but she knows the deal, comes with the package.

All of this rolled over us, as if we were utterly powerless to stop it. 

As he walked away, iPad closed and under his arm, he said to my friend, It’ll just be your first. You won't be able to stop. 

It was still noisy in that damn café after he left, but it felt quieter suddenly. My friend and I just looked at each other for a beat, then quickly dissected that whole experience. Mr. Over-Share, my friend called him. For reals, I said. 

But honestly, sister, it happens all the time.

XX