You laugh like you've never been lonely

I fucking FINALLY god damn did it.

Check. This. Out.

                       

I know it's upside down. Let's see that in super slow mo:

                       

I'm sorry, assholes, have you ever seen anything that fucking good?

                    

Extra Extra! Read All About it! My tattoo is the hottest shit in town!

                                            

After a nice, cooling bath of bactine and a nice, cool rubdown with nice, cool, water, my nice, cool tattoo.

I've had a lot of stuff on my mind while Derek has been gone. In a lot of ways, it feels like he's been gone for the entire three months already, and it blows my mind to be like, "oh shit, it's only been three weeks". I dyed my hair fucking magenta to kind of externalize some of what's been looping through my head, but the biggest thing I wanted to do was this tattoo. I've been working on this for YEARS. Check it:

                             

I initially wanted the branches to twist into the bottom of the molecular chain so it would feel more organic, but I didn't know how to draw that. When I went in and talked to Al about getting the tattoo, the idea changed into what it is now. He freehanded the tree, and I just...I couldn't love this more. It isn't exactly what I wanted, but I REALLY fucking love that he made it something different, because that's kind of precisely the point of this tattoo.

I have a lot of tattoos. Of all of the important relationships in my life, the ones I don't have tattoos for are my children, my parents, and my daughter's dad. I don't have a tattoo for my children because I don't know who they are yet, and initials are beneath me, thankyouverymuch. I don't have a tattoo for my parents because while my relationship with them wasn't always non-existent, I've always been sure that their influences weren't good, and I haven't had any idea about how to contextualize that into a tattoo. I'll figure it out eventually. I don't have one for my daughter's dad because, while he is SUCH an important figure in the history of how and why I am how I am, and he's inadvertently shaped my life for the last 17  years and I truly think that deserves tattoo recognition, I fucking hate him so god damn much. Like my parents, I don't know how to contextualize that into a tattoo. Maybe the three of them can share a single tattoo one day when I figure out what justified disgust looks like.

Two tattoos have no ACTUAL meaning to me. I wish I could erase them from my body, because I like that everything on me has a purpose and a meaning. I legitimately thought one was just pretty, and I was drunk when I got the other one. The latter was my second tattoo, a stupid tribal band that goes between my shoulders. I got that in Vegas, I was 21, my friend Adam tried to tell me I was too drunk to get a tattoo and I (drunkenly, stupidly, unkindly) called him a pussywillow faggot and told the hottest tattoo artist in the place that he was going to tattoo me that very moment, and that we should meet up and fuck later. That is definitely a girl who is not in control of her faculties enough to make a solid life choice, but it happened. He didn't fuck me, either.

The rest of my tattoos, though, definitely mean something. My mermaid with tree hair (Derek calls her my tree fish) is a tattoo for Amber and Allen. My Warning tattoo is for me. My Bukowski poem is for Dan. My coordinates are for Amber. My scroll and quill, while partially for me, are more about Allen (I've never told him that, though. Or anybody else, really). My feather is for Tosh. My escape velocity tattoo is for me. My kanji is for my grandpa (and then for all of the women in my family. That was my first tattoo. I wanted to do something honoring everybody in one fell swoop in case tattoos were just too much for me to handle. Spoiler! I can't fucking get enough of them!).

This one is for Derek.

At his request, I've been recording my blogs for him to listen to when he's on the ocean tomorrow. I read through every single blog I've written in the last six years. I did it all in two days. I read the ones that I have sitting as drafts because I didn't want them to exist anymore. I read the sex blog I kept. I read the blog I kept to vent to myself about how much I was hurting over Dan, and then used to vent directly TO Dan when I found out he had been reading it the whole time. I read how cruel I was to Derek when we were first together, and how the way I treated him was just so exactly how Dan treated me, and I told myself that because I was upfront about being cruel and unavailable, that it made how I treated Derek ok. Derek has his faults, and it's not like Derek hasn't done his fair share of shit to really dig in the knife and hurt me enormously, but it's amazing to me that Derek fucking stuck it out and waited for me to get my shit together without putting any pressure on me. I don't know why he did. He says it's because he loves me and always has, from the moment we started talking on OKCupid. That's a lovely fairy story, but most of me doubts very much that that's the case. It doesn't much matter, though. My attachment and affection for Derek, and his attachment and affection for me, however fucked he's been to me...those things have kept me grounded.