This story creates a heart-warming narrative of a couple and their passage through time together. It offers an honest, down to earth story structure. It uses flowing word passages and bleeding sentence structure to illustrate just how easy it is for two people to find each other in the world. Tiny and Lois’s meeting and eventual love showed how truly easy and accidental love can be. How easy it is for two seemingly strangers bloom into something more with very little resistance.
This story showed how love can physically and mentally change a person in entirety. Lois was painted by Tiny and became a “love letter,” an ode to their time together. Together they created a museum of art across Lois’s skin and personified their love. It shows how people tattoo themselves across one another and change together. Love changes you fundamentally. Lois became a map of her and Tiny love. It was only fair that Tiny would want a physical representation of her love across his own skin. Through this Lois also was able to find fulfillment in her own body. She grew in confidence to the point where she could openly sit with her mother while her tattoo were in full view.
This leads us to the last part of the story. The details of Lois delicately writing, “get well” across Tiny body left me speechless. In a way it made it seem as if him getting better was more important to Lois than showing and/or mapping their love physically. This was soul crushingly sweet as her own body was given up to create their “love letter” and all she asked in return was him to be ok.
I loved the ending and how the saying about being a “love letter” really tied the entire story together. I like to think that her saying “not yet” to be a museum is Lois foreshadowing her own feelings of when her life comes to an end.
Right, it’s a gorgeous representation of how emotion can change our own interpretations of our self worth. I love the acceptance of death throughout this piece and think its wonderfully depicted.