Balancing the Energy
I grew up the year I turned thirty-four. I broke up with my second husband, took a red-headed lover, moved to the sea, decided my favorite color was purple, quit dieting and took up swearing with a passion. I lived in a rental house on a quiet palm-lined street filled with soccer children and platinum haired moms, and I wasn't like them, I wasn't like them at all. I told the neighborhood children ghost stories behind my house, a bonfire spark popping in the ceramic fire pit I lugged back from Tijuana. I called the fire pit "The Vagina" and began collecting the first of my animal farm, a scrawny pooch with hip displasia I rescued from the pound. I dyed my hair purple, the royal purple of the gypsies, and I wore lots of black kohl around my green eyes and mini skirts with striped socks and layers of lingerie instead of button-up shirts.
My lover told me it was mid-life crisis. He told me he liked me better before I dyed my hair, he liked my eyes without the black rings, liked my quiet house before The Vagina and the pooch. I just rolled my eyes and laughed at him and put him to sleep with tornado sex, my hands wrapped in that good red hair, adopted doggie scratching and groaning under the bed. I knew it wasn't mid-life crisis, it was first-life grown up crisis, yeah, first-life crisis rising from fifteen years of motherhood running from that train wreck of an adolescence, all those years of casseroles and control freak husbands and the church of patriarchal wonder and heaps, mounds, years of maternity clothes.
I wanted a tattoo. I told my lover, showed him sketches of dragonflies, handmade scratches on paper, held it behind my back, against bare skin, showing him my plans for an ancient insect skin fossil bed.
"Cut it out, Birdie. Tattoos are common. Cut it out. You're still angry with your parents or something. Can't you just be normal again?" Red sat at the edge of my futon bed, such a young perfect specimen of a lover, wearing glasses like Cary Grant, his hands, oh those beautiful long-fingered hands holding the side of the mattress.
"Yeah. You're right. Forget I mentioned it." I leaned over to kiss his hair, waved him goodbye as he drove across town to his small condo at the water's edge, to his job as an industry engineer counting and measuring and placing things just so. But I was so not just so in those days, and I jumped in my car and drove far and dirt devil fast, down the east bound highway, to the cowboy town at the edge of the mountains and strode into the only tattoo parlor I knew, the one the alternative paper itself called artistic and unusual, and plunked my scaly pencil paper on the counter and pointed to my back.
A woman picked up my paper. She looked older than me by at least ten years, and her hair hung long and frizzy wild. She wore a red t-shirt and jeans, her arms adorned with bursts of color flowers and hearts and fairy dancers in a row, so intricate, so delicate, intimate, and I blushed, feeling as if I read a secret sex life story in this art. She copied my dragonfly on transparent paper, erased parts of wings and legs and reconnecting them, resurrecting them, a dragonfly changling, until it became a stylized iron-work dragonfly from a hundred years ago, a garden portrait insect, a perfect intersection of ink and carapace, and I nodded Yes, please, Yes.
I removed my shirt and lay face down on a reclining tattoo chair, black lace bra against the cool red vinyl seat cover, arms hugging padded metal in anticipation and fear. Two green street signs hung from the ceiling above me, Pain Street and Pleasure Street. I stared at them while the woman prepared the ink and needles.
I don't remember much of the tattoo process, it hurt like nails, put me in a trance of discomfort bordering on orgasm, and I watched a man with a silver bull nose ring pierce the belly of a young woman just come of age. The needle pierced my skin endless times, electric drone filling my ears, and I felt the woman wipe away excess ink and blood with a soft cotton towel. She never spoke, but hummed hard rock songs along with the radio.
"It's done! Take a look!" The woman's voice jostled me from my pain nirvana and I stood, back to a wall mirror, white rimmed hand mirror in my hands, and looked at my perfect iron ancient dragonfly.
"It's perfect! Thank you! You did such a great job!" I tried not to cry as I paid eighty dollars in twenties and collected an orange piece of paper with tattoo care instructions, but in my car, sore back against the blue towel acting as a seat cover, I cried and cried, cried for the sheer perfectness of it, the courage I had to get a tattoo, the way it reflected all things ancient and mysterious in my own skin. Oh, I loved it.
The following year I let my hair grow out to its natural auburn color, stopped wearing all that back eye makeup, put the lingerie away and broke up with my red-headed man. The Vagina broke into a thousand ceramic pieces during the move to my first California bought house. But I didn't stop casting ghost story spells on unsuspecting neighbor children, and sometimes they get a peek of my magic dragonfly when I stoop to smell the lavender bush in my front yard.
12:23:42 PM 
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