The Name on His Skin

My name remained on Darius after I removed his from every practical part of my life.

At the kitchen table, I changed passwords, closed our shared accounts, removed him as my emergency contact, and redirected his mail. Each confirmation arrived with its small, impersonal promise: the change had been made. Those notices brought more relief than blocking his number. Separation had paperwork.

The tattoo remained beyond my jurisdiction.

At first I imagined Corinne seeing it when he undressed. I wanted her eyes to stop at the letters. I wanted him to have to explain my name with his shirt off.

Even in that private revenge, I was asking my name to hold a place for me.

I did not want that place.

Darius could cover the tattoo, pay to have it removed, or let the letters soften with age. He could tell whatever story he liked when someone asked. The name was mine; the skin was his.

He mentioned it during our final call. I was standing at the kitchen window, watching the last light leave the brick wall across the way.

"I still got your name on me," he said.

"That was your decision," I said.

"It means something."

"It meant something when you did it. That doesn't mean I have to stay."

His voice dropped, and I could hear him breathing into the phone. Once, I would have softened mine in answer.

"So I should just cover it?"

"It's your body, Darius. You don't need me to decide."

He said nothing. I kept the phone against my ear.

I waited for him to ask another way.

After the call, I turned my forearm toward the window. The light caught the fine hairs, then faded as I lowered it. There was no mark of him on my skin. For a while, I had resented that he could point to something and I could not.

Now I let my arm rest on the sill.

I had nothing to show anyone. I no longer wished I did.

Julian sent me a photograph in the second year, at two in the morning, from a cookout in Aurora.

He was drunk and sentimental and had gotten the two of us confused with a version of the two of us that had been good, and he wrote miss you fam under it without appearing to know what he was showing me.

Darius at the edge of a folding table, in a white tee, laughing at something out of frame, and on his neck, above the collar, a shape.

He had not removed it. He had covered it. Or someone had begun to: a band of dark shading laid over the letters, thick and wet-looking, the kind of cover-up a man agrees to on a Saturday because the shop has an opening. My name was still legible underneath it. You could read the second half of it clearly, the way you can read a word through a single coat of cheap paint.

I enlarged it, which I am not proud of, and looked at it for a long time, and then I put the phone down on the counter and stood in my own kitchen with my hands flat on the granite and laughed until my eyes watered.

He had started. Of course he had started. One session, one Saturday, one afternoon of pain and two hundred dollars, and then the six weeks came, and the appointment came, and he did not go.

That is the whole man, in one square photograph. He begins things at full volume. He does not return for the second session.

I did not answer Julian. In the morning I deleted the picture, and then, because I know myself, I went into the deleted folder and deleted it again.

On the anniversary of his father's death, I picked up the phone to call Darius.

Grief had introduced us. I remembered how his voice changed when he spoke of his father, how he sometimes stopped in the middle of a story and rubbed his mouth. I knew what day it was without consulting the calendar. My thumb rested on the dark screen.

I wanted the day to be easier for him. I also knew he would hear a call as an invitation to call again.

In the third year I looked into what it costs to remove a tattoo, out of curiosity, because a woman at work mentioned her sister's.

Eight to twelve sessions on a name that size, she said, six weeks apart, three hundred a session, and it hurts more than getting it, and on darker skin you have to go to someone who knows what they are doing or you will trade a name for a scar.

So: four thousand dollars, a year and a half, and eleven appointments a man would have to make and keep, six weeks apart, while continuing to feel the thing that made him want it gone.

I laughed out loud at my own desk. Not bitterly. It was the cleanest joke the universe ever told me. My name is going to stay on that man's neck forever, not because he loves me and not because he can't let go, but because removing it is eleven appointments.

Two years with him taught me that a man's love could be permanent and weightless at the same time. Eleven appointments is what removal required, and eleven appointments is what was never available. That is not a metaphor I constructed afterward. It is a quote from a laser technician's price list.

I thought about my own body then, because I had my own permanent things. A scar on my knee from a bicycle in Diego Martin. Stretch marks I did not earn from any child. A smile line on the left that is deeper than the one on the right because of the way I have listened to people for twenty years.

Nothing on me says anyone's name. I used to feel that as a lack, at thirty-six, in a shop off Semoran with a box fan going, watching a man pay in my money for the privilege of wearing me.

Now I understand that I keep my commitments in the places where they cost something ongoing. My mother's prescriptions. Lena on Sundays and never on a Tuesday. A friend's divorce, three months in, when the casseroles have stopped coming. None of it photographs. All of it requires me again next week.

That is the whole difference between us, written on two bodies. His proof was visible and unfinished. Mine was invisible and due again on Sunday.

I set the phone facedown and lit a candle for the dead man I had never known. The match flared close to my fingers. I did not call his son.

Beside the phone, the wick bent toward a small pool of wax.