(S)erving(O)ur(U)nique(P)urpose

When I was 13, my best friend decided to start calling me marsupial. She has a tendency to make associations about people, and then come up with ridiculous new names to identify them. When we met, I had just moved from Australia to the US, and given that my actual name starts with the letters m-a-r-i-s...it was essentially inevitable at that point.

Once she started getting lazy about pronouncing the whole word, she abbreviated my new name and began calling me supial...then soupi...then just...soup. The new nickname eventually caught on in our circle of friends, and I became soup to everyone who knew us. I am now 29, and those friends (plus anyone they have since introduced me to) still refer to me as soup. I feel incredibly fortunate to still be able to call those my best friends.

Growing up, I spent the vast majority of my life seeking asylum with my family in various countries, because a US-fueled civil war in my homeland of El Salvador displaced us, and my parents took a leap of faith for the sake of providing our family with a chance at future prosperity.

The US wasn’t our first choice, but it’s geographically much closer to El Salvador than Australia is, and we have more family here than we do over there, for the same aforementioned reasons. There’s a strange irony about ending up in the country that essentially forced you out of yours, but the world is a convoluted place with obsolete systems in place that hinder progress in some of the most basic ways—that’s a story for another time, though. I’m not resentful to the US in any way. It’s been my primary home for the past 16 years. It still remains home for many of my friends from various walks of life, and I have no desire to ever leave.

After we graduated high school, one of our closest friends was deported back to her home country, even after having spent most of her childhoood in the US. It typically takes 10 years for a deportee to be allowed re-entry, and she almost made the mark, but she had an opportunity to apply for a work visa and was able to come back and visit briefly after 8 years—naturally our first instinct was to get friendship tattoos together.

Neither of us had tattoos, nor did we have any idea what would be the perfect image to commemorate our remote friendship. We eventually decided to get renditions of our adopted tweenhood nicknames along with 2 of our other friends (including the one who named us).

About 3 months prior, I had gone on a date with a tattoo artist I met online. We spontaneously decided to meet for coffee at 9 am on a Friday morning that we both happened to have off. At the time, he was living and working in Massachusetts as an artist half the week, and then apprenticing at a tattoo shop in NYC over the weekend. He would crash at a friend’s place in Jersey City whenever he would commute down, and at the time, I was living back in my parents’ place about one town over since graduating college. So we met in the middle. Somehow that date ended up spanning almost 2 days—between meeting up for drinks in Brooklyn after his tattoo shift, commuting back to NJ for more drinks, having him ride me all the way back to his place on the handlebars of a CityBike (mostly uphill, nevertheless—I mean, how could I NOT spend the night at that point?), and then commuting back to Brooklyn together in the morning before going our separate ways—needless to say, it wasn’t something I would easily forget.

Time got away from us, and we never did get a chance to go out again before he relocated permanently, but he was the first person that came to mind when I suddenly found myself needing some commemorative ink (not to mention his craft is impeccable, so it was pretty much a no-brainer).

So here we were, four loud tipsy high school friends, sitting in the shop way past closing time, on the night before one of us has to fly back home indefinitely, about to get tattooed by this kind sexy virtual stranger who agreed to accommodate us last minute. We walked out of there with a soup, a horse, a cat, and a demonic Furby doll (yes, this is the image my friend chose as her permanent parting gift) respectively. 4 committed life clients, over 3 countries, and a lifetime of friendship ahead.