We each had three different IDs during the course of our years as minors. But even if there had been a hundred, I’m sure we could have become each one of those girls. Becoming someone else; taking on a new identity; fooling a stranger into thinking we were older than we were, shorter than we were and not really who we were seemed no difficult task to either of us. The preparations to take on our ID identities grew rather involved. The usual prepping involved heavy make-up and a bit of ingenuity. Did I look like her more when I smiled with teeth or without teeth? Should I do the eyeliner all the way to the end of the eye? How about my eyebrows? What clothes should I wear? I would have to prep myself beforehand, putting myself in that person’s shoes. I felt like I had become that person. We kept our IDs in cigarette cases with some spare cash, so that, should someone ask, we could show them that we didn’t have a second form of ID with us. We also thought someone might see the cigarette case, assume that there were cigarettes inside and that we were, in fact, over 18. I remember the drive out to the tattoo parlor. It took forever, it felt. I wasn’t actually very nervous until we started to enter the city; the butterflies really hit me hard when I saw the actual place. I could see on the manager’s face that he knew we were both underagers, but he took our IDs readily; he seemed not to have any problems because they were pretty good pictures. Basically, he had the proof that we weren’t underage.
There are two parts of identity – there’s how you see yourself and how other people see you. By changing how other people see you, you can just hide the fact that who you see yourself as goes against that. We spent so much time taking on other people’s identities to get tattoos – to get older, faster in other people’s eyes – that for a period of time, I believed I was them. Once we had the IDs, we were 18; we were 21. In a sense I was older because people saw me as older. If you believe you’re someone else, other people will have no reason to think you’re lying about who you are. If you believe you’re someone else, your actions don’t have quite the same consequences.
A few years down the road, we find ourselves constantly changing our clothes, our hair-colors, our shoes, our tastes and our interests. The ease of changing identities makes me wonder who the hell I am. What is identity? And what’s the point, when you can so nonchalantly drop your own and take on another, not on the stage or the silver screen, but in Scorpian’s Tattoo Parlor in podunk Fitchburg, Wisconsin?
Marley is a senior studio art major from Brookline, Massachusetts.