Matryoshka

All Stacked Up with Nowhere to Go

BY THEA ROWE

Coming up on two years ago now, I learned how to stick and poke. I realize that's the quintessential, mid-pandemic, post-pinterest, DIYbitch thing to do. I went through bags and bags and bags of oranges, practicing on their cratered skin; I probably spent two months on the oranges alone. My fingers got chalky with their pith and smudged with marker ink, but I didn't want to waste any of the real stuff. It was easy for me to take my time with it since I like having something to do with my hands. My stick-and-poke training coincided with a period of my life when I was feeling slightly adrift and a little trapped. It was like being in a room with no door knob in sight; it’s like driving in a blizzard with the brights on–I like the room metaphor better, so we’re gonna stick with that one. After bags of oranges and several poorly-disposed-of sharps, I did end up tattooing myself. I dug seven tree rings into the inside of my ankle (the number doesn’t matter, I actually had to count just now). They’re supposed to be another metaphor; they’re supposed to serve as a reminder that I was, in fact, not born this morning. The tattoo helps remind me that I know more than I tend to feel like I do and that I have experience to draw on. However cheesy it may sound, it still helps me a little every now and then. 

Just the other night, I showed it to an old friend of mine for the first time. He lives a couple hundred miles away, so he hasn’t seen my face for a year. Over an Angry Orchard at the local haunt, he brought up how infinitesimally small the chance was that any one of us got to exist–how lucky we were that we did and continued to do so. He said something along the lines of “it's crazy that these are my hands,” and I remembered lying on the tile floor in preschool, wondering why I wasn't born a lion. I think this’ll be a truth I rediscover throughout the rest of my life: there’s always time for marveling. I'm a little giddy–even now–with gratitude that all my cells are magically still in the order they’re in. He asked me if I like it here, and I told him the truth: that I feel as though, in all the rooms that make up my personhood, there is a big and important one in which the lights have winked out, shut off, gone dark. I told him I hoped to figure out how to fix it when I got out of this city. There’s nothing wrong with the city per se; it's a beautiful place full of beautiful people, but it's a great big blanket shrouding the parts of myself that I want to reach right now. I didn't tell him the tattoo was a desperate grab at doing so. 

Despite this feeling of incompleteness, maybe even of loss, I am still whole and living and making more memories to fold into the next ring of the tattoo tree. Whoever I was before this feeling still exists; they’re probably still somewhere in my bone marrow, hopefully just snoozing, hopefully resurrectable. The rings are a reminder of exactly that: that everyone I've ever been is still somewhere within me—maybe hiding in the little cavern connected to my throat, between my nose and my mouth, or maybe floating over my head like a balloon, tethered to the peaks of my ears. I am all of them and they comprise all of me.

I met that friend the very first summer of my adult, or adult-adjacent, life in which I fully realized the ever-present truth that conscious awareness is a nigh impossible gift that cannot be squandered. It lit up each and every one of my days with a glow that I haven't really felt since. I've been a little preoccupied with finding the switches for the lights that have since fallen dark (to return to the metaphor). Being with him reminded me where to look for a few of those switches, not all of them, but at least a couple, maybe, for just a moment. He reminded me of who I had been and still was somewhere. This probably has something to do with how when we first met, I was having a summer full of that same realization he was describing in the bar. I've been rereading the poems I sent him when I was home in Michigan and really feeling like it. His glass of water is still on my coffee table. I might add another ring to my ankle this week.