Driving to a tattoo parlour on other side of the city I listen to music that transports me to other places. I’m blown away by the things humans can make. Aphex Twin bleeding into Can, Cormac Begley morphing into Lankum, sounds straddling time like they were on a date.
I get the appointment time wrong and so sit in a café to wait. I wait and write about time travel. How life can feel like it is happening twice. How I can be present in body and elsewhere in thought. How the DNA of my mother and my babies cling to my brain like a limpet on a rock.
She tattoos my arm with a jimmy-joe. It is only now that I learn its name. The long thin line of the stalk hurts the most. I want it structured, architectural to contrast with the fluid organism of my arm. When I twist my wrist the line becomes a curve. A bit like time. Linear, but not.
On the way home I listen to two women talking about how sound might be one of the portals to time travel. Sound and how things smell. I also listen to a conversation about how the memories of motherhood overlap.Â
Two days later I go to a play written by a friend. We stand there, my friend, and me and the director, all three of us have known each other for nearly twenty five years. We stand there the three of us older, greyer, and also still twenty years old, three young college students talking wildly about writing words and making plays. We are 44 and we are 20, we are so different, we have not changed.Â
Today, in the strange silent heat of this October weather, I write for a few hours about my grandmother and the photos I have of her visiting Berlin in 1936. I write about how me and my mother went back to the same tourist spots when I lived in the city and retook each of the photos, this time with my mother in place, her standing in front of the same buildings, or recreations of them, the ones my grandmother saw were bombed to rubble. Same, same, but different, I wrote.
A line but not.
For those of you who’d like to know:
I was listening to Cillian Murphy’s Limited Edition on BBC Sounds
I was listening to The Maternal Journal podcast with Saima Mir and Sinead Gleeson.
I went to see Somewhere Out There You by Nancy Harris, directed by Wayne Jordan at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
