It was late 2016 in New York when I first received the urge to get inked. As my limbs numbed in what would be my last winter in the city, I itched to feel something. The urge was strong but also empty—I didn't yet have the guts to sit down and be repeatedly pierced by a needle.
I also fixated on the idea that tattoos, especially your first, should be laden with meaning. It must mean something deep, I would tell myself. That immobilized me.
If my tattoo didn't come to me in some epiphanic vision like Jesus came to St. Faustina to be immortalized in a painting, then I should at least have served my hours thinking well and hard about it. And to my credit I did try to do that—sit down and squeeze my brain for any clues to what was worth putting on my skin. Nothing came out of my labors.
Three months later, I lost someone important to me. I lost the person I would call my favorite teacher for the first time after nearly two decades of being in school.
He was Professor Moulton, my grad school music teacher and work supervisor. The person who, when I was archiving concert footage deep into the night and into my eye bags, would pop up behind me and say, "Hey, kiddo." Warm smile on his face. Slow, measured walk. Energy light and crisp like spring air already luring me out of the muck of myself.
The loss was so sudden. In less than 24 hours, I'd learned he was terminally ill with not many days left, in hospice accepting visitors and then no longer accepting visitors, and finally, gone.
I remember collapsing into my friend's arms in the locker room, completely debilitated by the news, and her carrying the weight of me as I cried and heaved and hurt.
It was a harsh antidote to winter's paralysis. Spring came and melted the thick snow and with it, all the words for him I’d buried in it.
But there was one thing left in the wake of my loss—a seed. The seed of my first tattoo that I knew would be about him. I would wait seven more springs before this seed sprouted. Seven springs and seven tattoos to be exact.
Professor Moulton loved to tease me. Whenever he caught me practicing for his class along the halls, he'd smile in jest and say, "Don't be such a perfectionist."
While we were cleaning the school's workroom one afternoon, I asked him what the object underneath a pile of tangled cables was. He said, "Oh, that's a radiator. A small one to keep the room warm."
He then walked over to the piano in the room, placed his hand emphatically on the lid and said, in his most stoic face, "Now this—this is a piano. People use it to play music."
I laughed, sprawled across the carpet floor.
"But it's hot in the Philippines. We don't have radiators there," I argued.
"Oh right, I guess not... I bet you know all about air conditioners."
He had such an open and curious spirit. "Do you ever wonder what aliens would think if they watched us go about our day only to keep returning to the same place at the end of it?" he asked in class once, as a tangent to the function of home keys in a piece of classical music.
Sometimes he would play the piano for us to demonstrate a concept. But there was one class he played Brahms just for our listening pleasure. I was so moved by the push and pull of the notes that I stayed back after class to ask about it.
"That thing you do when you slow down some parts and then speed up... is that called something?" I asked.
"Ah, that's rubato. An Italian word that means 'stolen.' A musician does it for expressive purposes."
In music, rubato is "robbed time." It's the performer's license to disregard the steady pulse of time and warp it. It's playing with time like a potter shapes wet clay. At least that is how I understand it.
Robbed time. That was what it felt like to lose Professor Moulton in the fullness of spring.
I wish my last exchange with him wasn't about the busted sound system in one of the studios in school. I wish that when he offered his help in troubleshooting that over Skype, I took it. I wish I'd given him the letter I wrote him and not lost the chance waiting for the Perfect Time. I wish he’d left this world fully aware of how much he means to me.
See, there was a lesson thoughtfully tucked into his performance of Brahms that random day: time will always be vulnerable to thieving if I don’t take my creative liberties with it.
Rubato. That is the word that now sits on my wrist, right on my pulse point, holding meaning organically.
It's my first tattoo, seven tattoos later.
Professor Moulton taught me that among others.
That and to know a radiator when I see one.
I miss you, Professor Moulton. Thank you for always believing in me.