Fingerprints.
Does anyone else follow Neil Gaiman's blog? You should, because the man is fantastic and so are his entries. He recently got married, and I am in love with him being in love.
But today, he posted a different sort of entry, here. You can read it for yourself if you like, but the summary is that he's in Sydney, Australia right now, and when he was out walking he spotted a woman with a tattoo on her shoulder -- a quote from something he'd written ages ago:
Sometimes, you wake up.
Sometimes, the fall kills you.
And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.
I can't exactly remember what it's from, though I do remember reading it and I would have recognized the words as being his if I'd stumbled across them on my own. But anyway, this is what he had to say about the experience:
"I read the tattoo, read words I had written to try and exorcise my own small demons eighteen years ago, and I felt like a ghost. As if, for a moment, under the hot Sydney sun, I was only an idea of a person and not a real person at all.
I didn't introduce myself to her or say anything (it didn't even occur to me to say hello, in all honesty). I just walked home, through a world that felt flimsier and infinitely stranger than it had that morning."
And it was so strange to read his words (about his words), because I had felt this weird, aching twist in my gut when I read the tattoo; the sort of sharp pull that steals your breath without causing pain and that leaves you vaguely disoriented after. It struck me for an entirely different reason that it did him, obviously, he being the author and all. But it's so weird; it's like ... he left an imprint on the past somewhere, an imprint with an echo strong enough to affect even himself in the future. An echo that called out to the woman with the tattoo -- to all women with the tattoo, since he managed to find an image on Google without any serious effort later -- to everyone who has read those words. And they were meant to 'exorcise his own small demons', but they speak to everyone.
Ripples upon ripples, joining together people who have never met one another and who probably never will.
Words containing a power even their author didn't necessarily intend.
Huh.
But today, he posted a different sort of entry, here. You can read it for yourself if you like, but the summary is that he's in Sydney, Australia right now, and when he was out walking he spotted a woman with a tattoo on her shoulder -- a quote from something he'd written ages ago:
Sometimes, you wake up.
Sometimes, the fall kills you.
And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.
I can't exactly remember what it's from, though I do remember reading it and I would have recognized the words as being his if I'd stumbled across them on my own. But anyway, this is what he had to say about the experience:
"I read the tattoo, read words I had written to try and exorcise my own small demons eighteen years ago, and I felt like a ghost. As if, for a moment, under the hot Sydney sun, I was only an idea of a person and not a real person at all.
I didn't introduce myself to her or say anything (it didn't even occur to me to say hello, in all honesty). I just walked home, through a world that felt flimsier and infinitely stranger than it had that morning."
And it was so strange to read his words (about his words), because I had felt this weird, aching twist in my gut when I read the tattoo; the sort of sharp pull that steals your breath without causing pain and that leaves you vaguely disoriented after. It struck me for an entirely different reason that it did him, obviously, he being the author and all. But it's so weird; it's like ... he left an imprint on the past somewhere, an imprint with an echo strong enough to affect even himself in the future. An echo that called out to the woman with the tattoo -- to all women with the tattoo, since he managed to find an image on Google without any serious effort later -- to everyone who has read those words. And they were meant to 'exorcise his own small demons', but they speak to everyone.
Ripples upon ripples, joining together people who have never met one another and who probably never will.
Words containing a power even their author didn't necessarily intend.
Huh.