Tiziano International

March 2nd 2011

If there’s one thing I’ve understood, it’s that everyone is looking for something that lasts forever, but then as soon as we get close to it, we feel like we have to run away.

That’s what I thought today while looking at the arm of a girl at Monaco airport. She was there to work: a massage parlor right in the middle of the international departures terminal, allowing stressed travelers to enjoy fifteen minutes of relief before yet another connecting flight. A nice idea, I think.

I had time so I decided to take those fifteen minutes - a decision that proved to be excellent. On her right forearm, the girl had a kind of large dark pink scar that unraveled, indicating shades of azure, almost blue. Not symmetric enough to be the work of a scalpel, but too regular to be accidental. Looking closely I realized: it was a tattoo. Or rather, that what remained of an attempted removal of a tattoo.

And I was impressed. The girl had a tender expression, sweet, but this showed traces of a latent pain, unresolved, ongoing. Why do we insist on introducing things and names under our skin if we later need to remove them? And above all: why do we insist on removing them if we know that the marks are left behind anyway?

The truth is that the desire for the infinite is understandable and uncontrollable. The truth is that I also feel like a victim of this impulse-necessity, and this tattoo, dug out in the middle… maybe it’s crazy, but it comforted me. Because I like to meet other fundamentalists of love like me, people who go towards their destiny without fear of permanent damage, who give themselves up to the feeling with the idea that all it can do is make your life better. And I like to think that under that piece of skin there was the name of a great love, even if finite. Something you can abandon yourself in at least for a while, in the illusion of “forever”. 

Never mind that that something, that someone, then cheats on you, abandons you, disappoints you, no. The aftermath doesn’t count, for us who aren’t content with anything that’s worth less than an emotional storm. Because even the most visible scar will always be less ugly than a missed opportunity. The opportunity to really feel loved.

And I go back to England, after four months.