The Difference One Letter Makes 

By Nicha Jaroensuk 

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“Isn’t it going to really hurt after? Out in this cold?” I asked the jaded tattoo artist as I looked outside the window of this Brooklyn tattoo parlor, snow sprinkling down like icing on a cake. “The cold won’t really make a difference”, he replied, I can tell he can’t wait to get my very first tattoo (his 8th that day) over with. 

 

The tattoo artist, without looking at me, grabbed my wrist and switched on the tattoo machine. The buzzing sound traveled through my body like electricity, I gazed at the needle moving at the speed of a thousand lightning bolts while the pulse inside my wrist rings like an alarm clock. 

 

This may be my very first tattoo, but it’s not the first time something’s got etched on me forever.  

 

“Are you going to hurt me, leave me out in the cold?” I asked Christopher, a best friend who’s about to give me my first kiss. Beyond being a strangely vulnerable 15-year-old, I was also a young girl in love. Both of us stood still as rocks in the school hallway after swimming practice, hand-in-hand, sealed with a kiss, he promised his love was true. As his lips touched mine for the very first time, the buzzing sound traveled through my body like electricity. “This is going to make all the difference”, I thought to myself, imagining a future filled with adventures while standing in a quiet empty hallway - with love right in front of me. 

 

Love, like a thread, etches - stitches to the skin, sometimes to the bones. As fast as lighting, you can see, not just feel, how your every action, your every thought, is stitched in its color. It can either send you off into a sweet slumber or imprison you inside nights of cold sweats and monsters, not under the bed, but inside your head. It takes you places, insane, insatiable and all the way back. I am certain I have held love, it lived in the pulse you can touch on my wrist. I remember it felt like a kiss, like being etched - like a needle piercing through my skin.

 

I would have died for Christopher, would have resurrected and lived for him all over again too if that’s what he wanted. Months, years, decades, I was stitched up as his living rag doll. It came as no surprise that I’m here in this Brooklyn tattoo parlor at 25, a decade after my first kiss, watching the tattoo artist imprint each affirming letter onto my wrist, one by one, L-O-V…

 

“E..Emergency room!? Where is it? Can someone help me? Please!”, screamed the 20-year-old me. “I’m looking for Christopher Cleary, he was just brought in…” I asked the nurses or whoever that were around to witness the painful desperation - my worst nightmare, the one I’ve never dreamt of. 

 

Welcome to the wrong side of love. 

 

The world has never stopped as abruptly as that night in June. Christopher has taken my breath away, for the very last time. I gasped for air and stood in a cold room, still as a rock, with love right in front of me. He’s draped over with a white sheet and his cold, lifeless hand was held by another woman. It’s his mother, whose soul is now so shredded there’s no amount of thread that could sew her back together. I found it to be both tragic and comedic because I, too, was ripped apart beyond stitching but I also felt etched with pain so deep it felt like a thousand volts of lighting, electricity running through my bones. 

 

“Almost there.” Said the tattoo artist who’s snapped me back to another cold room in the heart of Brooklyn. I looked down at my wrist, L-O-V-E. “Just one more letter, then we are done.”, he said, a silent sigh. I watched him carry on, one last letter, L-O-V-E-D. 

 

“It’s just one letter, but it makes all the difference, doesn’t it?” I said to the tattoo artist as I looked out the window preparing to walk outside. The snow has finally stopped but the cold? That seems like it would linger forever.