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Past perfect — erased recursive past.
An absence noted, in the margin, a presence.

I had had a tattoo. An astonishing business.

All the more so since this tattoo occupied, on a grand scale, my tiny child's back.

Was I a parchment?

A key? A projection screen? What desire, what foreign trajectory, what occultation was written onto me? What conceals more—the act of erasing, or the act of tattooing first?

Did they try to bolt me to the world, when I was outside, echoing through unborn time and space? Did they use me to send a message to God, a letter, during one of my flights?

Am I an angel, a carrier pigeon, or Lucifer himself—inverted?

Did I broadcast, wherever I went, the sign of some Great Demon—to kill, I'm told?

When was I marked? By whom, and for what? The inscription was removed as one would carve into a stone.

As one would break a frame, grinding it down into dust and ashes.

It might have been a seal. A sigil. An encrypted shadow, or a title deed.

Maybe a map, written in Sumerian, to set the tone.

Was I a support for invocations? Now I want to play with this, or interpret it, as though it were a musical score. Maybe I want my tattoo back—my backshadow, a counterpoint, a skinny back-world, playing the hermetic black stars.

Shall I invent an instrument of fire to play an older song of dew? Moisture vapor. Have I been mist-spelled?

But I'm also credited with having moved objects by thought and with having been able to turn lights on from a distance in my very first weeks—with having always walked, always spoken.

So I am obviously a support for collective projections. What, then, could they have written onto me?

What is perhaps most troubling is that the tattoo has been removed.

How? In the early eighties, private erasure could only have meant another inscription—an extremely brutal one. Doctors claim to see this sign on me today—"Sir! Did you scratch your back?" Not lately, honey!

Perhaps all signs are reflections of an absence inscribed at the heart of reality. A lack, a flaw, a once-inked misalignment.

Are we not ourselves reflections of an absence inscribed at the heart of all things?

Diary entry, Jan. 30 2026