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Show bones and never stayed long in the cavern, relying on that fire to shoot straight back through to the other side. A few seconds down there, and your own biology is about all you know. It was as good as anything I've felt to rise, dripping, onto the weeds and dirt. The last time I went was just before sunrise. The sky was violet when we arrived. In the time it took to make the hike, move through the ice water, and arise back on the other side, wide-eyed and anxious, the sun fell halfway down the mountain. It felt like rebirth to emerge from dark water like that and back to earth at morning, suddenly warm and bright by contrast. The cave was freezing, constricting, frightening; but quiet and calm, too. And breathing again afterward was to inhale and swallow sunlight. Blake had a lot of tattoos on his body. I liked the railroad spike tattoos on his shins the best because I liked trains and because the shin is the ultimate skateboarder tattoo as far as body location. He also had two half sleeves, the more colorful one on his left arm. I never paid a lot of attention to the individual parts of that tattoo, but as a whole I knew it looked like a waterfall flowing down onto a pink lotus flower near his elbow. Besides the water and the flower, all I could remember of Blake's sleeve was the color: red lines following the curves of the water, dark green blurring into black on the outside. I liked the idea that someone might be walking around with his tattooed skin. Blake once told me that one of the things he liked best about tattoos was the way they map a person's life-for him, there was nothing sad about a straight edge tattoo on someone smoking a cigarette, or the name of a long irrelevant lover on someone's arm because of the way it was honest about the past. He liked all of that, and I loved the vision of someone walking down the street with a second-hand lotus flower on his arm. |
