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kerry
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"what's easy for you?" he asked, squinting and wiping the ink from my skin.
it seemed like such a simple nothing-kind-of question.
"what do you mean?"
he leaned back down, brought the gun to my bicep and i felt the needle digging in, ink flowing into my skin, how many layers i don't know.
"like what's easy for me, what's easy is this. tattooing is my side gig. my other job is at a bagel shop. in here," meaning the little pink-painted studio, walls covered in framed drawings and thank-you cards and shelves with trinkets, "i do what i love."
beyond the buzz of the tattoo gun i could hear johnny cash on the little bluetooth speaker. he was on a johnny kick, he'd told me.
"exercise," i said, surprising myself.
he sat up, cracked his back, wiped away more ink. "that's great."
"i just put on music and sweat and don't think."
i'd never thought working out would become easy, but after several weeks of dutifully unrolling my mat, setting my weights out in a line on the rug, twenty minutes of discomfort followed by a cool shower, it had actually become easy. i got sick, or busy, couldn't move for several days, i realized the grouchiness was largely due to missing my workouts. i began to crave the routine of it all--light breakfast, brush teeth, sweat, that fleeting feeling of invincibility before i step into the shower, my reward.
i asked someone else this question-"what's easy for you?"--and was told "nothing, absolutely nothing."
and here and there i ask myself again, what is easy? i can usually find something.
putting on a record, letting myself do nothing, slicing an apple, making small talk with the woman who runs the little cafe on the 14th floor, watering my plants.
when everything feels impossible i try to find one thing that is not.
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240904
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