Nh

I find every moment with you intoxicating,
Every moment apart a turbulent current of insecurity.
I wonder, do I trust my intuition,
Or descend to the candlestick’s pyre?
Discordant, trending toward order;
I pursue the immortal truth in solitude,
Versus the transient solace in lies of omission.

Haven’t been practicing the lesson that I had inked into my flesh specifically to stare back at me every day in the mirror.

In reversed latin, across my upper chest, just beneath my clavicles, there is a phrase that only becomes apparent to someone looking at it in the mirror.  I figured it was a great way to keep focus on a particular troublesome character defect; one of those ones that keeps causing instability, drama, and/or pain.  I’d given somebody, in the early stages of a relationship, too many chances, around the time I got this tattoo, and I’d been taken advantage of and hurt badly because of it.  The more that I looked back on things, the more I realized that it was precisely that injection of instability that had, on a significant percentage of the times, caused me emotionally devastating end results.

I wasn’t going to trust somebody else to do the translation for me, so I pieced together from my own paper dictionaries what I believed were the right words, verb conjugations, and the like, to build the following rough translation: “One chance for strangers; two for friends; three for blood.  No negotiation.”  It might sound a little strict, but one has to understand that it is all based within the context of the lesson.  It’s about letting important personal boundaries slip, especially to habitual offenders about crossing lines.  It’s about allowing one’s self to remember only the good about a situation, when the negatives were too dark and menacing to sanely ignore.  I really don’t care if the translation is perfect, either.  The words are for me, not for anyone else.  They convey the mantra to me more clearly than anything else, thus they are correct for me.