Narrative

Addriana Carr

Dec. 8th 2008

EN 111

The Star in My Sky

 My best friend skips by mirrors and just happens to notices that he “Looks very attractive,” that day. Rodney is a slim boy with black hair, and one nose piercing too many. We are nothing alike.  Despite our differences, six months after meeting, we decided to cement our friendship to show people that we were truly a united front. How? With blood, tears, and a lot of ink.

Rodney and I met on the school bus my junior year of high school. We’d only been friends for a few months when he turned to me suddenly and said, “You need to start living more for me and a lot less for you.” It may seem strange, but I agreed. From then on, my world revolved around a high-strung teenage boy. I really had nothing better to do with my time, so I was fine with helping him help himself.

Despite our fast and easily friendship we faced the challenge of distance quite early on. Your best friend is usually the one standing right at your side, wearing the t-shirt that says “I’m with stupid,” with the arrow pointing your direction, but that was not the case with us. After I graduated high school, I took a year off before going to college and Rodney was off to finish high school in Detroit. We were separated for the first time in two years and I had thought that things would change. However, each trip I made to Detroit to see him was a complete shock, mostly, because it wasn’t shocking at all. It felt as if no time had passed, though we hadn’t seen each other in over half a year. Nothing ever seemed to change in our relationship. We remained as close as the day we met.

When the day finally came for us to get our ink, I was tenser than I thought I would be. Rodney kept saying how excited he was, lively bouncing around the tiny tattoo shop, grinning and chirping, “We’re gonna be connected for-e-verrr! Aren’t you excited?”

My less than animated reply was “Yeah, sure Babe,” as I sat in the chair trembling, my pen scratching all across the page as I signed my consent for the tattoo. The tattoo shop itself didn’t help my stomach settle in the least. I felt like I was trapped in a dungeon of my own making. The room I was to be tattooed in was really a piercing room, all cloudy gray cinder-blocks and a paltry little window in the corner.

The moment of truth came and I was petrified. The owner of the shop was going to be buzzing away at my skin, while another artist would do Rodney’s tattoo in another room, to save time. I tensed up; terrified I wouldn’t even get to hold his hand during the painful process. However, they agreed to let me start first so that he could hold my hand to shy away any lasting jitters.

You see, my mind was determined to do this, something I had wanted for more than two years. But my body was telling me to run out of that sterile smelling brick room and start screaming in search of my own sanity. I had a stomach ache like none I had ever experienced before and a hammering headache to match it. I was terrified I would chicken out, or worse, that I’d break down into tears right in the middle of it and leave the shop with only half a tattoo and a very un-amused best friend.

Rodney weights about 115lbs and is nothing but skin, bone, and few measly arm muscles. So he, in all his brilliance, decided the only acceptable place for our tattoo was his chest, right in the very center. The shop’s receptionist barked out laughter upon hearing Rodney’s choice of placement. The owner tried to reason with him that he was too thin to get a chest piece, which he wouldn’t be able to finish because of the pain involved. When that didn’t work, they tried reasoning with his mother. Rodney was only seventeen, so his mom had to authorize for her son’s tattoo. That is how much our parents believe in our friendship. They never sat us down and said, “We don’t think this is such a good idea. What if you’re not friends in 20 years?” It’s generally accepted that we will always be a part of each other’s lives.

In the end, Rodney got his way. And I got through my nerves. What really helped was the wisdom from both Rodney and the owner; “The lines come first and they’re the hardest, the color goes in nice and easy.” I was reassured that the most painful part would be over soon,  and that I would only need to grip fiercely onto the armrest of my chair a teeny bit longer.

My short bout of peace was shot down when I realized color was causing me to pull my own hair in agony. They had both outright lied to me and by the end of the filling in process, I was trying not to let salty tears slide down my cheeks. From the glass window situated in an inner wall of my room I could just see Rodney lying on his back and the tattoo artist bent above him. It didn’t look like he was taking it any better than I was.

I never want to repeat this experience, not with Rodney or anyone. My tattoo hadn’t been that bad. The pain was easily outshined by my excitement. What I don’t want to see again is my best friend trying to hold back tears, as beads of blood pool on his chest faster than a cloth can wipe them away. I don’t want to not be able to hold his hand because he had to sit on them, just to keep them from punching the poor guy unlucky enough to be shoving a needle through his skin repeatedly. I can’t see that look of agony in his eyes again.

The two of us are very sentimental and we chose to incorporate lyrics from one of the songs we used to sing together by Gregory and the Hawk.  Our tattoo is a ring of four black stars, each getting bigger as you move out from the center with twisting swirls sprouting from the indents of each point. The lyrics, “If you’ll be my star, I’ll be your sky,” rest on the swirls because they represent our relationship perfectly.

What Rodney and I went through that day proved to me that we will indeed be connected forever. Every now and then I get a message online or a text that says “I miss my sky,” from him and am reminded again that every moment of stinging pain was worth it. This experience showed me that not only are we able to endure a great distance barrier; but that we will be all the stronger for it.