I was getting the tattoo, in part, to mark a break from the man with whom I’d spent four years building and then dismantling a life. I was branding myself to mark a new era: my body was no longer entwined with someone else’s. It was mine alone again. I was moving to a new city and I had a new book coming out, and the tattoo would be its epigraph: “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.”
The quotation belongs to Terence, the Roman playwright. In the original Latin, it reads: homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. When I first came upon it, I felt its force beyond rational explanation. I knew it was something I needed to keep saying.
Jamison: Mark My Words. Maybe.