A Tattoo Bleeds Life

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. –Zelda Fitzgerald

In November of 2018 I suffered from Broken Heart Syndrome. I wrote about it on an online blog for parents of kids with disabilities, implying that it could have been a collection of things; including the stress compounded by caring for a child with a disability. That was not completely true. I know what broke my heart. Though it was not a what, but a who.

***

Valentine’s Day, 2019, one week before my 42^nd birthday, I gave myself a gift. It was one of those passing time moments, between arriving back from taking my son’s service dog for a walk and leaving to pick the kids up from school. My phone had been charging as I held it in between my bed and the wall. I wasn’t even going to sit down. A tattoo artist popped up in my Instagram feed. She had drawn an anatomical heart in black, with peonies sprouting out of it. The skin on the back of my neck started rising and followed all the way down my arms to my legs, which hadn’t been shaved in months.

The drawing was reminiscent of Rupi Kaur’s sketch in a Sun and Her Flowers, placed beneath her poem

what is stronger
than the human heart
which shatters over and over
and still lives (109)

***

My partner of twelve years cheated on me inconsistently over the course of eight years. Months of couples’ therapy could not repair the chasm between us that was necessary to allow them to explore their true, queer, self while I struggled to move along with them. Like the swing dance classes they had given me for my 40^th birthday, in the dancing, first we moved closer and then we moved further apart.

Every morning in the shower through that fall and winter, I cried. I added another song to my Spotify Letting Go playlist. I held such a big space for the grief, and I needed to find a place to put it. I wanted the emotional pain to be physical. I wanted to mark up my body and transfer that pain because any physical pain would not have been as painful as this heart breaking.

***

When you have a deep seeded fear of abandonment, accepting that someone has left you is a difficult process. It’s much easier to do the leaving, as I did when I left the US over twenty years ago. No one could leave me, if I left them first.

Not so.

M would leave me one evening that November. They would stay overnight at their “friend’s” place, even though they weren’t exclusive, even though M and I – husband and wife at that time – were still sleeping in the same bed. Every couple has their own set of rules for an open relationship. That’s what we were trying to be, a couple. This was how we were trying to do it. Albeit unbalanced, as I was incapable of opening up my side of the relationship. I still held the mindset “I do” means just us.  Forever.

I wanted to make it work. I wanted us to stay together. So, we (mostly I) made the rules and they tried to follow them.

First, and foremost, was no sleeping over. Next, the “date” needed to be in the calendar, at least two days ahead of time. In addition, M had agreed to check their phone once during evening dates, in case of an emergency/need, but otherwise I was to give them that space and time, without interruptions.

That night they broke all of the rules.

This would be “the day our marriage died.”

***

A couple months later, the following January, M would return “home” to Australia for a month to have the space they needed to decide how they wanted to live their life moving forward. While they were gone, I would have that same space, but in the home where all the memories had been created. I would also be managing said household, with two kids under the age of ten, on my own. During that month, I spent a lot of my evenings on the couch watching movies, i.e. escaping my current reality. Some films, like LA LA Land and Wild, were ones we had seen together, but this time I was watching them alone and with new eyes.

In Wild, when Reese Witherspoon is on top of the mountain on the Pacific Northwest Trail, re-enacting Cheryl Strayed’s journey to herself, it was me on that mountain. When she lost one boot and threw the other down after it, letting out a guttural howl into the ravine below, I felt a howl move up from my stomach, into my chest, where it became stuck. I wanted to know THAT letting go. I wanted to know the freedom that came with that letting go.

I would find it, though not for another month and not from a hike on a remote trail; but from the bench at a tattoo parlor in Midtown, Toronto. I laid back and stretched out my right forearm on the navy-blue cushioned armrest. The artist spoke more French than English; small talk was unnecessary and impossible. A friend I’d invited to join me cancelled. It was just me, the needle, the ink, the pain, and my thoughts. After we decided on the perfect placement, she placed the stencil on my right forearm and massaged it down. I heard the paper crackle, and my skin began to tingle in anticipation.

This would be my third tattoo. I knew the pain that would come with this gift etched into my skin, but I welcomed it. I’d had two babies’ worth of birthing pain. I could handle another tattoo.

The heart breaks for many reasons. Every single one is an immeasurable pain. I could not handle more heartbreak.

As she etched black lines on pale, smooth, untouched skin, I relaxed into the pain. With my eyes closed, a series of scenes flipped through my mind from the past ten months.

I was there in the shower, crumpling down onto my knees, tears falling in sync with the water pelting down from above. The only place where no one could see me or hear me cry. Dan Mangan’s music became the soundtrack of that season. Songs like Just Fear and Fool for Waiting became an embrace, a confidant to lean my weary head on. He understood. Well, at least his words said he did.

The first leaving. The return.

The second leaving. The return.

The slammed doors.

Dark, suffocating days.

Broken glass from wedding photos thrown, shattering across my bedroom floor.

Anxiety turned into panic attacks, quelled only by medication and therapy.

Harsh conversations. The weight of silence.

The taking. The breaking.

The images moved slow then fast, as the feeling in my arm moved in and out of numbness, like the days into nights that I had cried all there was to cry, and only emptiness was left.

I opened my eyes and glanced down as she broke to shake out her hand. I could see the image forming. The petals moving up into the black shading, around the edges, the curves, the muscle lines and valves of an anatomical heart. I’m ok, I thought. The sting was more than bearable against the backdrop of the emotional agony from the previous ten months. I wanted this. I wanted to channel emotional heartache into physical pain onto my skin. Then I wanted to let it go.

When she started etching on the edges of my forearm, closer to the inner crease where my elbow bends into itself, a bolt of pain reverberated through my body, I clenched my teeth and tightened my eyes closed. I saw myself there, on the mountain top, the one on the Pacific Northwest Trail. I was screaming. Screaming out all of the heartbreak from the previous year. Against my dark eyelids, I saw myself there: mouth wide, arms out, screaming with my whole body. Pushing it out. Transforming my broken heart into a recovering one. A heart in which new life has sprouted and will grow out of it. I began to feel lighter and the tenderness in my forearm dissipated.

***

Walking down the aisle at the grocery store, tattoo healed, the physical pain a memory, an employee in the freezer section, maybe even the meat section, looks me right in the eyes and says, “That is a sick tattoo.”

I smile. And think, yeah, it is. “Thanks.”

Our hearts do not take breaks, they must keep beating to keep us breathing. If they stop, we stop. I had to keep breathing.

There would be more tattoos; not be to transfer the pain, but to celebrate life.