Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Tattoo

I am watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, missing Priscilla Moura Freitas, who was my love and best friend for 9 years. We saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the first time together in the movie theater when it first came out. We saw it in Downtown Seattle, where we lived at the time. There were so many parallels between ourselves then and the characters, it became our movie and it is still one of my favorites. Me so much like Joel, down to the writing, mumbling, and avoiding conflict. Priscilla like Clementine, impulsive, wild, erratic, and I loved her for every chaotic moment.

I miss her, the fire to my ice. Ever since she passed 12 years ago, going on 13, I have been wanting to turn the tattoo I got of her name into a memorial tattoo. The original one I got when I was 18 years old in the living room of the tattoo artist.

At the time she told me I was dumb, I laughed and got it anyway. 

Below is a picture of the original one as it stands and a very rough mock up of what I would like to turn it into (I do not want a black background). I am actually thinking a fire and ice Claddagh style hand / heart combo.

When I first got the tattoo there was yellow highlighting the blue and black. At one point I thought I would just restore the original and put the words “Forever in her sepulcher of the sounding sea. My light, my beam.”  The first part you may recognize as a riff on the final lines of Edgar Allen Poe’s Annabelle Lee. The last part is based on a poem I wrote right after she died that was inspired by the Anonymous Poet’s Pearl Poem. 

We met in highschool online back when it was taboo and not the norm. We met on ICQ. She had posted on a chat request forum saying she was depressed, and I was too, so I messaged her. We were teenagers, crazy fucking teenagers. The first time I read Edgar Allen Poe was when we first got together, so I immediately prescribed it to her, which is why the reference has meaning. The fire and ice was us, it was how we describe ourselves together. She was the fire and I the ice, the sagittarius and cancer chaotically drawn together. 

It’s taken me so many years to even think through the tattoo — to get the heart to change the tattoo, even if it was just to restore it. It has taken me years to even write something so detailed about our time together. It’s taken a lot of focus on actually processing the emotions sounding her death. Even now towards the end of the movie, as Joel and Clementine lose so much but have another chance, I can physically feel my heart ache with the “what could have beens.” We will never have another chance, she will never have another chance. The way she died was preventable and I must admit I still blame myself for at least part of it. She was so close to so much, we were moving past old hurts together, and then she was suddenly dead. It threw my entire world upside down. I couldn’t sleep, I would dream of her constantly, I couldn’t maintain relationships, I even had a nervous breakdown. 

She was the girl I moved across the country for twice. Once to Florida from California and together we moved from Florida to Seattle because she had fallen in love with it after watching the Real World and I was desperate to get back to the West Coast. We moved together to a city we had never seen to an apartment we had only seen pictures of. We literally had to borrow toilet paper from the neighbors because, well we were kids in our first apartment away from any parents and we didn’t think it through. It is one of my favorite memories.

But time marches on whether you want it to or not and it’s time to continue on foraging new connections while appreciating the ones I have.