Well, You Probably Saw This Coming.

Because it is this way anyway, I'm getting the name of everyone I've ever slept with tattooed on my person. If I get the money or get emotional, maybe I'll do full-color momento mori portraits of the ones that were at all important to me, smeared initials in discreet places of the ones that weren't. If things don't get too crowded (at least one person deserves the full length of my back, in neon or some kind of fantastic hologram tattoo technology that hasn't been invented yet), I'll throw in Patrick Whitlow from second grade, maybe that neighbor chick who let me basically molest her in that teepee one time and the cartoon lounge singer from Who Framed Roger Rabbit that confused me so utterly. I have a special section of myself designated for long, milk-carton descriptions of the people I've thought really hard about fucking but didn't: that-guy-who-played-the-bike-messenger-in-that-one-Italian-movie, man-on-the-bus-carrying-a-paper-bag-full-of-amazing-fruit.

I know it's probably enough that I remember them as hard as I do. And yes, jerks, I'm aware that I am incapable of writing about anything but them, that they are the ensemble cast of those subconscious-scraping nightmares I wake up choking on so often and the riot of voices screaming into the loudening pipes that my bones become whenever I'm touched. I know that it's a weak metaphor, and that it's pretty twisted to begin with: my body as the altar that praises right back everyone who's stopped to worship at it. I mean, it's disgusting, really, but what am I supposed to do? My skin is the only part that no one expects to forget, to pull them all into some slow and perpetual undertow of shed and re-grown cells, to lose them forever.

(Photo is from Denis Darzacq's series Hyper, which is, like, stupidly cool and I will probably post most of if it here).