One downward sweeping stroke, barely kissed by two concave, backwards curls. Not quite a letter, a character unrecognizable, even to me.
Not my name and nowhere close to my initial. Yet it seems to be my signature just the same.
A pattern, a shape, a symbol that, defying definition, is written with compulsion, without choice or understanding. Simply to be repeated throughout my life.
By two shaking, pudgy fists that pull gnarled sticks through wet sand and cloying mud. By adolescent hands that scrawl on toilet walls and bus shelters, illicit cider dulling their sharpness, but instinct rising just the same. Scored with a compass, dragged through tender, flinching skin; later overwritten with vivid, violet ink.
Doodled on lecture notes and the margins of essays, on messages taken and messages lost. Traced on the backs of menus, receipts, bus tickets. Sketched inside books, some borrowed, some mine.
And always, it seems both familiar and distant, comforting and unsettling.
Question and answer.
With no explanation, no recognition and no resolution, this symbol, my symbol, stands alone.
Each day on the early train, armed with a blunted pencil, I repeat the marks time and time again.
As the other passengers avoid my eye, repelled by my vacant intensity.
Until she arrives.
Her. The girl with autumn-burnished hair. That smells of bonfires and pungent leaves.
Who sits close to me; waiting, watching. Undeterred.
Who reaches out and without speaking stills my hand. Who rolls up her sleeve and lays her forearm next to mine.
Whose patterned skin is the mirror that tells me finally I am home.
Comments