Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”―Chuck Palahniuk
Thursday day started innocently enough, an email from Pinterest:
"More tattoos for lizdvart” & “Matching tattoos and more.”
Sheesh, as the boys say! Way to hit me in the heart space, right now <3
I’ve already been thinking a lot about the way I carry people with me + being a compilation of everyone I have ever loved.
A friend sent me this passage this week, of course landing right at a time when I was already feeling “a way” about it . Months ago, I wrote a Insta caption alluding the same, we are all just a culmination of the people we know + knew.
We truly are a made up of everyone we’ve met.
And sometimes we literally carry them on us.
I got my first tattoo when I was 18 {sorry mom} with my high school friend while on a trip to visit her dad who lived outside of Yosemite. It was exactly the kind of thing older people advise younger people about all the time. What you love when you are 18 is not necessarily the thing you are going to love when you are 30 or 40 or 60. Lucky for me, the half dollar sized outline of a fairy isn’t the worst choice I could have made. Even better I often forget it’s there, since it’s hidden {not for you to know where, sorry dear reader}.
It would be years before I would get another tattoo, not because I didn’t want like 100 of them, but because I couldn’t decide on which one to get next. I carried a card from a yoga deck for years, because I wanted the lotus flower outline on my body {eventually getting it on the back of my neck}. Then came the boys elemental signs on my left forearm {mothering side + I have an air baby & a fire baby, so if you see those two triangles that’s the boys}.
There’s something wonderful, I think about carrying a person on your body, whether it be a memory or some version of them only you know. A little bit of them always with you. like the e.e. cummings poem:
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)