Queen Anne’s Lace

 
It hurts going in. I am face down on the table, my breasts squished up into themselves and a pillow given to me for comfort. I am sober. I am willing. I’ve asked the artist’s assistant to tie my hands and wrists to the corners of the table legs in case I should flinch and ruin the design. They have obliged me in this small request and have asked if I wanted my legs tied as well, but I am not running away from this and my feet shall not move me. This much will suffice.
        As the needle goes for seconds and thirds on my skin, I think of the puncture like eyes peeking into the underside of my skin. What is it seeing through me? What is it touching on the other side? And then, I think of you. This is your tattoo. You came up with our sign. I merely asked for it. I remember a room lit all in white; it was off of a room lit entirely in green, behind a motorcycle shop where you lived in San Francisco for a time. I couldn’t write to your address, I remember, as the apartment didn’t exist. A friend of a friend let you sleep there at night, and take showers in the bathtub in the middle of the red kitchen earlier in the morning before the motorcycle shop opened.
        I entered the bright white-lit room. The walls were held together by curtains and crates which stacked up all you appeared to have in the world. I looked up at the low ceiling. You’d found half a chandelier and hung it low on one side of the room so that the tip of its crystal pendants could graze our heads when we stood up. On the other side of the ceiling, above the bed, was a deflated-looking swing of thick ropes, a trapeze for the flightless, for those without wings, like me, weighed down by slow flesh. By the end of the night I was flying there, suspended in air, my legs and my ass no more an inch above the bed, my breasts and hands turning blue from the cut off circulation of the ropes.
        “I can cut you down at any time,” you offered. But I shook my head no. You suspended me there, a cage of my own making, and kissed any and every part of my flesh not bound in the ropes. You stood on the bed naked and fed me wine slowly, though it dribbled on my neck. I could feel it traveling down my chest, though I could not see it, feeling instead the warmth of this trickle of kindness. And then you kissed any parts of me that were free.
        Afterwards, when you untied the easier knots and cut the harder ones open, you rubbed my burns from the rope with oil and rose petals, and talked sweetly of communion. You made a pot of jasmine tea.
        I lamented, in the way I do whenever someone gets too close to that chamber that houses me. We have no children. We have no wedding rings. We have no photograph to tack up on the fridge. We have nothing to mark our time on this plane. It’s as if we don’t exist. We don’t go to restaurants. We don’t go on dates. There is no one who will know to call the other in case of overdose or death. Your fingers were tracing the outlines of the Snake Goddess tattoo on my arm. You put your fingers in your mouth, like you could taste the venom of my request, then placed your fingers against me until again, I was almost there.
        “This is going to take up your whole back. Breathe. Breathe. That’s it,” the artist assures, “We are half-way through. All the stem part is done.” It’s been the better part of an hour. I will keep up this steady discomfort for at least another hour as she pierces, scratches, and hatch marks my skin in the design you picked that night in San Francisco. I am trying to keep my muscles relaxed. I’m trying to breathe, though I feel just as suspended as I did that night above your bed. For my part, I’m remaining true to our vision. I close my eyes. There is no one to feed me wine, no one this time to kiss my red scarred flesh that will bubble and blister in the days to come as I become, truly marked by you. The assistant’s lips were thin and quiet like yours. She is standing nearby awaiting an unnecessary order from the artist. I imagine her lips on my skin and I breathe. Eyes closed.
        I’m in a meadow; where, I’m not sure. But it is sunny and I’m wearing yellow. I don’t wear yellow usually, but I am here, in yellow and barefoot like Eurydice waiting for a snake to take her down. Did she know her husband would try to rescue her and bring her back to life? You are here somewhere, perhaps under the hawthorn trees in the distance but I cannot see you clearly. There’s not a path to follow and the Queen Anne’s lace stalks are three feet high. I reach out my hands to touch them, each with their one drop of blood purple or red. When you’re more weed than flower, you have a certain clarity, a sturdier bouquet to offer bridgegrooms and lovers. But some just want their lace delicate, not wild. Some leave their lovers be in the underworld and do not try to retrieve them.
        I must have let out a moan. I wasn’t meaning to show any slight appearance of pain.
        “Do you need a break?” She asks, “a sip of water?” My back is half-finished. I can feel the flowers now as well as the stems. I can feel the wind of the meadow in the small dark room with the two women hovering over me. The only thing I can’t quite feel anymore is you.
        “Keep going,” I instruct sweetly, smiling into the pillow. I try to look up. The assistant catches my gaze.
        “It’s going to be beautiful,” she assures.
        You were to get the tattoo as well, a back’s worth of truth and treachery. No hearts with arrows or teardrops, with our names in the middle, just wild weeds and sustenance with no explanation. No words. We could be a thousand miles away and in the throes of other lovers’ movements and there we’d be, half-there, and half in meadow calling on the powers of the Earth to make us whole.
        I can see it now as the tattoo artist seems to be quickening her pace to the end. The assistant tries holding up a mirror in her hands so I can see the work. It is beautiful. The fresh wounds of my back, the bumps of red flesh and black ink would have flattened and healed by your fingers and your tongue. The skin would not flake. I can feel the trace of your licking the lines of the stems, the kisses of each tiny flower. And I would gladly do the same, even now: imagine you face down in white linens prepared like an altar offering, an awaiting feast. The ceremony of us so near completion. I sigh and think perhaps the women have felt me pulse and release at the thought of you. My face reddens against the pillow and I begin to wiggle my fingers slightly to feel if they are indeed still there beneath the bindings.
        They are. I am.
        “Almost done. I just have to switch to color for the spot in the flower. Did you want it more red? Or more purple?”
        I am back in your white-lit room, right before you cut down the ropes for the night. How I loved that slight feeling of flight. Not soaring, but hovering just above the rooftops with you, safe enough to almost come down on my own accord. You knew to take me down right before I thought I could go no further. Right before I realized the droplets wetting the bed below were coming from me.
        Red is the obvious. Queen Anne’s finger pricked on the needle gives her name to the wild flower. But we weren’t obvious and I have no more open wounds. They are scabbed over and I am not picking at our distance, not this time.
        “More purple than red,” I decide. The color of bruising. The color of flesh just released.