Don’t forget, but forgive the past.*

[bending_sickle]

Until I Find You by John Irving (2006)

“Not a very original idea, but even Jack was learning that there was little original in the instinct to be tattooed. Not only were broken hearts fairly common; the ways to depict them were limited, and the part of the body where a depiction of a broken heart belonged was self-evident.

In those days, a tattoo was still a souvenir – a keepsake to mark a journey, the love of your life, a heartbreak, a port of call. The body was like a photo album; the tattoos themselves didn’t have to be good photographs. Indeed, they may not have been very artistic or aesthetically pleasing, but they weren’t ugly – not intentionally. And the old tattoos were always sentimental; you didn’t mark yourself for life if you weren’t sentimental.

How could tattoos be original, when what they signified was something ordinary? Your feelings for your mother; the lover who left you; the first time you went to sea. But these were mostly maritime tattoos – clearly sailors were sentimental souls.”

i like my body when it is with your
Body
- EECummings

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
- Hughes

Oh, when I was in love with you,
	Then was I clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
	How well I did behave.

- AEHousman

“’Look, it’s obvious you want me,’ the dancer said. ‘Stop fighting it.’ She’d taken off all her clothes and had managed to destroy most of Jack’s. ‘You have a hard-on,’ she kept pointing out, as if Jack didn’t know.

‘I get a hard-on in my sleep,’ he told her.”

“Live with it, the photos said. Don’t forget, but forgive the past.”

“’You don’t still hate me, do you?’ he asked her.

‘That’s a work in progress, Jack.’”

“’I watch you when I can’t fall asleep,’ his sister said.”

“’Don’t you want to drink your tea?’ he asked.

‘I want to do exactly what I’m doing,’ Heather told him. “I want to never take my head off your shoulder, I want to hug you and kiss you – and beat you with both fists, in your face. I want to tell you every bad thing that ever happened to me – especially those things I wish I could have talked to you about, when they happened. I want to describe every boyfriend you might have saved me from.’

‘You can do all that,’ Jack told her.

‘I’ll just do this, for now,’ she said. ‘You want everything to happen too fast.’”

“’Do you have bipolar moments?’ Jack asked her.

‘The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again,’ his sister said. ‘The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face, and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you – just watching you, waiting for you to wake up. I’m not talking about sex.’

‘I know,’ he told her.

‘The desire to live with you, to never be separated again,’ Heather went on.

‘I get it,’ he said.

‘The constant wish that I never knew of your existence, and that our Father had never said a word to me about my having a brother – this in tandem with the desire to never see another Jack Burns movie, and that every scene in every film you were ever in, which I have committed to memory, would vanish from my mind, as if these movies have never been made.’”

“What had Professor Ritter said? ‘Your father has suffered losses.’ The losses alone were enough to make anyone feel cold; maybe William’s tattoos had nothing to do with it.”

“They agreed that you have to give the people you love a little privacy, even if you ‘re afraid for their lives.”


* Until I Find You, JIrving