On Tattoos and Chairs
“If I lived here,” I tell Miguel as we wait for our table to be ready at the very crowded Vietnamese place around the corner from my apartment, “I think I’d get a tattoo.”
Miguel looks at me like he knows I’m lying but doesn’t have the heart to call me out. Either that, or I’ve gotten my Spanish wrong and what I have actually said was that if I lived here, I’d become a dog walker.
I haven’t spoken more than a handful of words in English since we met up earlier this afternoon, unless of course you count the English words I’ve tossed in with a Spanish accent. It’s surprising how many times I can get away with this; a couple of hours ago, when I was explaining to him how New York City is currently busy congratulating itself for finally joining the nineteenth century and instituting garbage cans, I confidently rolled the “r” in “rat” and tacked on an extra “on” at the end and turns out? Raton is rat en español.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
We’re drinking glasses of chilled white wine standing on the sidewalk and I’m talking about tattoos because it seems almost everyone around us has one. The wiry guy who put our name on the waitlist twenty minutes ago had a flowering tree growing out of his bicep. There’s a brunette with a tasteful outline of a bird on her calf a couple of feet away. While I’m studying her leg, a man walks by, arm in arm with his date as they leave the restaurant and I spot chunks of what looks like tribal prints inching up the back of his neck.
And it’s not just this restaurant; I’ve noticed ink on the majority of young people all around Buenos Aires, which is a sentence I realize just aged me ten years. Kids these days, I’m apparently hollering from my porch, with their phones and their slang and tattoos.
I’m not scolding, though - I think I’m just jealous. I consider getting a tattoo roughly once every six months, usually around the time I’m devising a new career plan. Maybe I should become a firefighter, I’ll think after watching a truck scream by while I’m eating my bodyweight in carbs at an outdoor cafe, a firefighter with a tattoo, obviously. Is there any other kind? The fact I’ve never run toward either danger or needles doesn’t occur to me; the thing that’s holding me back from my pole-filled painted future is obviously the permanence.
I don’t know what I would want to brand myself with, mostly because my brand keeps changing.
While living in New York in my twenties, I decided what would really make my life complete was a comfortable brown leather chair where I could relax on Sunday mornings and read The New Yorker, which I had just started subscribing to, back in the time when people still had paper magazines delivered to their apartments.
I’m sure this notion of quiet elegance has come from Sex and the City, which is to blame for most of my mounting credit card debt, but like most ideas of mine at the time I feel powerless to stop it. I have convinced myself I won’t be a complete human until I find the perfect leather reading chair, and most of my spare time is now devoted to scouring the city for one.
I quickly discover actual furniture stores are offensively out of reach for my junior account executive salary, and I do my best to control my face when a salesperson explains the gorgeous wood and leather recliner combo I am sitting in is roughly equivalent to what I pay in annual rent. “Oh great,” I say casually, like all I need to do is figure out when I would like it delivered and not like I am trying to determine how quickly I can leave the store without being rude. “I’ll let you know!”
The market for second-hand chairs will have to do. In the time before apps with words jammed together like OfferUp and LetGo, this means heading to their founding father Craigslist, the brilliantly basic one-stop-shop website for apartment rentals, jobs, and sex.
And also, it turns out, chairs.
“I’m trying to find a place to live,” I told Miguel when we first met a couple weeks ago, which has become my refrain when anyone asks what I’m doing so far from home and for so long.
Upon hearing this, most people react one of two ways; they’re either unsettled and immediately explaining how my life confuses them, or slightly envious and expressing how they wish they too could drop everything and leave, if only the things they carried weren’t so important. I understand both perspectives because my life is patently absurd and if I wasn’t currently living it, I’d probably have similar feelings towards a foreigner who showed up in my town armed with the language skills of a toddler yet the confidence of a T-Rex.
Miguel doesn’t have either of those reactions though; he just looks at me with kind brown eyes and nods, brushing away the curly hair that’s flopped down onto his forehead. We’re at a vegan restaurant he’s taken me to located inside an abandoned parking garage that has been filled with plants and sparkling white lights.
When I ask him about his dreams, what he’s interested in accomplishing with his one wild and precious life, I try my best to follow the vision he’s outlining over our eggplant appetizer; I think he’s talking about owning and designing vacation rentals around the world and I nod along enthusiastically, easily imagining his empire springing up in front of us.
I like spending time with Miguel because after every third sentence or so, he’ll stop and ask me if I understand his Spanish, and he rarely lets me get away with faking it.
”Tell me what I said,” he’ll say skeptically when he senses I’m lost, trying to figure out where he went four paragraphs back, and I’ll have to stutter out some version of what I’ve understood. If I’m right, I feel triumphant. If I’m off, he just smiles and sighs, figuring out a way to further simplify whatever he’s been talking about.
After spending a couple of fevered days scrolling and calling and visiting random walkups around the city, I find it; a beautiful, plush leather chair a man is selling for $100 that needs to be picked up that night.
A dream with a deadline? Even better.
When I arrive at his building and get to sit in the chair for the first time, I can feel it; everything I ever wanted to become will happen as soon as I get it home to my apartment. In this chair, I will read The New Yorker cover to cover each week, which will obviously give me interesting antidotes to drop at the fabulous cocktail parties I’ll be invited to and which I will attend confidently and with zero credit card debt, all thanks to this wide, square chunk of brown leather.
This chair is also the first piece of furniture I am buying that will be solely mine, not split or inherited from a parade of random roommates. This chair will mark my adulthood, announce my permanence in New York, will get rid of the nagging itch to roam the world that’s plagued me since before I can remember. I can’t travel endlessly if I own this chair and all the classy sofas and rugs and tables that are sure to follow in its wake. No, I will finally stick around, I will finally put down roots; this shining and soft brown leather beauty will be the sturdy cornerstone in the solid life I am going to build.
This chair holds not only me but all my hopes and dreams for the future. And for only $100? What a deal.
It’s strange, trying to date without access to all my words; while Sophia Vergara might get away with confusing verb tenses or swapping adjectives, I don’t exactly have her assets. Words are what I use to form a connection; if we’re not laughing within the first couple of minutes, I’m usually looking for the exit. I’ve managed to make Miguel laugh though, and not only when I say something completely wrong in Spanish.
“What site would I use to look for apartments?” I ask him one morning while we’re sitting on my couch having coffee. “If I wanted to live here.”
He opens a couple of tabs on my computer and we scroll together, ooh-ing and aah-ing over kitchens and gardens and bathrooms, because real estate daydreams are the same in every language. The apartments are affordable and gorgeous and he asks if I’d really consider getting a place, if I’m actually thinking about staying.
I don’t know yet if I want to stay, but for the first time in a long time, I’m not thinking about leaving.
After getting the chair back to my apartment, I spend a couple of glorious weekends being cradled in its soft expanse. I finish The New Yorker, I leaf through the New York Times, I sip coffee and wine and feel exactly like Carrie Bradshaw, if Carrie Bradshaw was bald and living in a slanted fourth floor walkup in the East Village.
But as the weeks go by, I can still feel it, still hear the whispering in the quiet spaces of my mind. The itch, the pull, the growing sense of dread that maybe this chair isn’t a cornerstone at all but an anchor, weighing me down to a place and a life I don’t know if I’m ready to sign up for quite yet. The doubts crash into me and soon I’m covered in them, sinking into this chair that was supposed to lift me up but instead feels like it’s swallowing me whole, like a Venus fly trap, closing in on my freedom.
And so a couple of weeks later I announce I’ll be moving to China, explaining to my friends and family how this latest twist isn’t a twist at all but a straight line to where I want to be. I am ostensibly moving to Shanghai to learn Mandarin because I was recently accepted into the Foreign Service and need to be fluent in a critical language to move up the wait list I will expire from in eighteen short months.
”But can’t you stay and learn Chinese in Chinatown?” almost everyone asks, noting how close my current apartment is to thousands of Mandarin speakers and dozens of language schools. They’re clearly not wrong, but they can’t feel the itch or hear the whispers that by now have turned into a dull roar; for me, there was never a choice in staying, only a reason for leaving.
I pack what I can fit into two suitcases and sell or give away the few things I own; stacks of books, the guitar I haven’t played in years, my trusty maroon Schwinn that got me around the city.
I decide to give the chair to my brother who has just moved to New York to begin his career after law school. I tell him to take good care of it, that I will be back for it one day.
Twelve years later the chair has been folded into his life, helping to furnish apartments as he moved from New York to DC, maybe not a cornerstone but far from an anchor in his steady and stable ascent into adulthood. It's currently sitting in the basement of his beautiful house, where my nephews use it as a launching pad for various games or a place to sit while they help Mario rescue a princess who somehow still needs saving.
When we finally sit down to eat at the Vietnamese place, I’m so hungry I decide we should order two appetizers, plus some more wine.
I ask Miguel if he likes the restaurant’s interior design choices and we talk about the decor; pointing to things we find pleasing and debating what we might change. The bright colors are bold and inviting, but maybe the snaking neon lights dangling over the curved bar we’re sitting around could be swapped out. I glance at the woman next to me and spot a faded star etched on her wrist while she fishes out a tangled ball of noodles from the steaming bowl in front of her, chatting happily with her date who I assume is also sporting his own permanent artwork installation somewhere.
The restaurant hums around us with the sounds of a neighborhood enjoying a Saturday night out, clanking glasses and scraping chairs while outside a train rumbles past, the same one that crawls underneath my apartment windows around the corner.
I come back to our conversation, trying to focus on the words I can understand and attempting to use context clues for the ones I don’t; rooting myself in the present moment which thankfully for now, I don't have any reason to leave.
Your essays are always so interesting and fulfilling to read. Thank you for 1) being SO good at expressing yourself through writing and 2) sharing it with the world.
This is great. I totally can relate to trying to follow a conversation in Spanish, especially when the Zumba ladies are all talking at once.