My relationship ended on a Sunday. On Monday, I got a call from my best friend.

“I think it’s time you do something you’ve been talking about doing for a long time,” she said. ‘I think you need to get a tattoo.”

She was right. I had been talking about getting a tattoo for years. It was one of those, “man, you know I really want to do it, but I’m just so not the kind of person to do THAT” sort of thing, a bravery for other people, not for me.

“Let’s do it together,” she said. “I want another one. Figure out what you want, then we’ll go and do it.”

The sticking point: what to get permanently scrawled on my body. I spent a few days mulling over the options, and after rejecting a ton of them, the perfect solution revealed itself.

The bull from Picasso’s “Guernica.”

Why the bull? I’m a playwright, and the “Guernica” was at the center of my first play. I’m also a Taurus. And the bull is, in some scholarship, considered the representation of the artist. And the image always felt to me like resilience, fortitude, steely determination.

So, now Picasso’s bull sits on my upper left arm, and I’m one of the inked masses. It’s a gesture I’m proud of, a bravery for other people that I’ve claimed for myself. And the tattoo certainly separates the wheat from the chaff: handsome gentlemen who recognize the image’s origin get a second look and the ones who ask if it’s a tattoo of my dog don’t.

(Someone really asked that. A dog with horns? Seriously?)

I thought my friend was just being impulsive when she first recommended the tattoo, but now that I have it, now that I can look down and see it sitting there looking brave and resilient, I realize she knew exactly what she was doing (and she always does, damn her and prescience.)

Change comes, and it moves swiftly and decisively. One day something is, and the next day it isn’t. And we don’t have much choice in the matter. What we do have control over, what we can dictate, is how we handle that change, what we do with it, what we shape it into.

Change can scar or it can mark. And we decide which it will do.

Scars are ugly, irregular, unshapely and coarse. Marks, like tattoos, are thoughtful, beautiful, purposeful.

I don’t want to read another story about a southern gay bar raided by policemen, men forced to the ground, called faggots, sent to hospitals or just humiliated. I don’t want to read another news brief about a domestic partnership law or a marriage equality bill being fiercely opposed by people claiming to care about “the sanctity of marriage.” I don’t want to hear about another hate crime, another 11-year old boy killing himself because kids called him gay at school while no teacher did anything about it, another man of faith saying homosexuals should die, another spiteful diatribe by the Maggie Gallaghers of the world, another Prop. 8.

I don’t want to, but I will. Because sadly, that’s what change looks like for our community at this moment in our history. And we have a choice: it can scar us or it can mark us.

History has already scarred us enough, no?

So in the face of ugly change, we should craft something beautiful. Make calls. Write letters. Attend demonstrations. Join groups. Go to Washington for the National March and meet the 365Gay gang at the meet-up. Come out. Organize. Blog. Shout.

Do.

Turn change into something you can live with for the rest of your life, etched out on your body in ink.

When my tattoo artist was putting together the rendering of the bull for my tattoo, he asked how closely I’d like to adhere to the original image.

“I mean, you want the balls and all?” he said.

After a moment’s consideration, I answered, “Yeah. Balls and all.”

There are worse ways to live your life, yes?