That’ll Leave a Mark

This piece appeared originally in Hokem Magazine. The new issue (#5) of Hokem is out this week.

I got my first tattoo when I was 20. We had to drive to Rhode Island, because they were illegal still in Massachusetts. It cost $75, and the woman who did it talked on the phone the entire time, the receiver crooked between her ear and shoulder. This marking felt important to me at the time. I had the idea that I could tell the story of my life with pictures on my skin.

Deeper still, some rides leave a mark, a discernible electric streak through your gray matter, an experience easy to recall. Vividly. Viscerally. These aren’t just memories, squinting back through time’s mists. They’re physical. They exist, written in chemical and hormone, groups of neurons that are encoded and entangled, that light back up in unison when you call them back, or sometimes when you don’t.

They’re not just in your head. They are your head.

I am sitting on a narrow, leather saddle on the side of a steep hill in the north of Vermont. The surface is dirt, sandy but thick, impregnated with snow melt. It cloys to my shins and chainstays and chain. Everything grinds. Everything hurts.

My back aches beyond aching. I’ve been churning at the pedals all day, calling down to the engine room for more power despite an empty fuel tank and a seized motor. I wonder to myself, “Why am I here? Why, when this hurts so much? How can I make this stop?”

But there’s no stopping. Not here. Here there’s just wet sand, the smell of dead leaves thawing out of banks of plow snow. Other idiots float all around me, slowly upward, in their own cones of pain. Stopping avails none of us one single goddamned thing.

I let out a laugh, like you might at a funeral in a moment of inopportune silence. “There is nothing for this,” I thought, “but to keep going, to sit here in this pain until it’s over.” A tattoo for your soul, oozing blood, wiped clean and bleeding again, until it’s raw, until it’s finished.