I work in a bookstore that also serves coffee. Bookselling, already an intimate business, becomes more so when you make someone a drink. Each of us want another to listen to our stories. I hear many stories.
I met a man who drew his losses upon his body with tattoos. It is as if he drew his body into pain and joy to ease the pain of both parents dying so close in time, their last breaths almost exhaled as one.
This man drew his sleeves up in a store thick with strangers and showed me his journeys of grief and memory – Flagstaff to Natchez, a black line serpentine on skin; then again, on the other arm, others pausing to watch, Flagstaff to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a black line serpentine on skin. He had ridden those journeys on a bicycle. It was his way of honoring them, of letting the suffering go, and maybe of finding solace in movement.
He spoke of days of heat, of climbing, of flying down, of wind, of cramps, of cars wild to pass, of percussion blasts and pressure shocks, of his hunt for exhaustion and his search for the body’s oblivion. He rode through the wound he still wore in his face. He spoke as if he had found peace, and in a kind of wonder, that he had come to tell me of how he had drawn his pain upon his body.
