Sorry this post is a bit late! I had a lot of trouble posting it for some reason.

I thought it was a bit ironic that I was assigned Portrait 8 for this week. I’ve been fascinated with the concept of body art since I started building on my initial ear piercing around the age of fourteen. Like Charlotte, I can strongly identify with the way tattoos become a part of you, and with the desire to turn one’s best memories–the ones you want to hold onto always–into permanent, irreversible marks. Unlike Charlotte, I come from a family that doesn’t feel the same way about such things. When I pitched the idea of getting a tattoo for my eighteenth birthday, the answer from both my parents was a resounding “no.” They voiced the same concerns that Miller cites in his chapter, mainly, the fact that they will change drastically as your body does.

And so, I am left to show the meaning of things in much less permanent and personal ways. Like Charlotte’s collection of earrings that she was forced to remove, my grandmother’s necklace lives in a little felt box on top of the stereo speaker in my bedroom. I mentioned before that I don’t wear it very much. I did a lot of thinking about that after writing the post, and I realized that it probably stays there because I don’t think about my grandmother all that often. I was very young when I knew her, and was young when she died. I never had the opportunity to form a relationship with her beyond annual Christmas visits, so on some level, it’s understandable. Of course, the reverse is also true–because we don’t have photographs of her (or anyone, really) up in my room or anywhere else in our house, I tend not to think very much about relatives I rarely see. My own bedroom–crammed to the nooks with things I’m currently using and thinking about but sporting very little in the way of memories–has become a reflection of the way I think primarily in the moment. My grandmother’s necklace, in its little box alongside a handful of other trinkets, is almost a physical symbol of my fleeting moments of remembrance, and its absence a symbol of my own thoughtlessness in the midst of a busy life. Like Charlotte’s photograph of her lover, it’s become a memory-turned-artifact.

Of course, that’s not to say that my mind would change if my connection to my grandmother consisted of more than just jewelry. I like to think that I’d give more thought to distant relatives and past memories if I had more permanent and outwardly visible reminders around me–pictures, knickknacks, photograph albums, or perhaps a meaningful piece of body art like Charlotte’s tattoo. On some level, I think it would. My mother recently has begun clearing things out of our house, and I’ve been searching through years’ worth of uncovered materials in hopes of finding some family photographs to put up in my room. From an anthropological standpoint, I feel like there’s been a trend toward collecting memories nowadays–be it a family history, heirloom, or story–so I think people like Charlotte, who mark their own bodies with memories, and others who collect and display memorabilia, are on some level beginning to make the world into one very large habitus, comprised of the unique artifacts and memories of individuals.