tattoo virgin

Wandered into a cavernous caff in West End and the girl there was showing me her tattoos. I am squeamish and have never pierced my ears. Tattoos are beyond me, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. We stood poring over her long brown arms, turning and tracing the story which evolved from something simple into something faceted. “It’s nice talking with like-minded people,” she said.

I thought about this word like-minded and what it means. The people I hear using it seem to be people I feel comfortable with. I wondered is it just what I’m hearing, or is it that people who use this word tend to be people I get along with and like. Is it a less judgmental and more fluid term than for example “they have values I respect.” Is it less confining and more welcoming and free from expectation than the older “we have a lot in common.”

This girl bristled with insignias I don’t desire or share. There was an age gap. We were strangers. I was her customer. What was it that lept the gap in such a brief conversation, that left us feeling comfortable, feeling even a mild affection? How did we divine our like-mindedness? Well, through expression and language and tone and eyes, the languages of the soul and body. Does like-minded maybe mean not so much “our minds are alike” as “we both tend to like people’s minds”?

I think about the conversations I have with the people I would call “like-minded.” Every week, some spark, and some do not. There is something exploratory. An acceptance of difference. A failure to require the stranger to conform to a recipe either of us have arrived with, or that has been ready-handed to us.

In the miracle bowl of my brain and the miracle foreign world of hers, something gleamed. There was an element like sunshine or moonlight or rain that we could enjoy in one another that was universal and therefore shared. The sparkling sea of rain that sloshes round a souvenir: an experience there are more than fifty words for: two separate worlds stood side by side for a fleeting instant, worlds transparent yet ineffable, in a shared kind of frame, like snowdomes for entirely different monuments.