17.11.22, Sunny and breezy in Berkeley. //
Sitting in the lobby of Industrial Piercing and Tattoo, waiting to be called off the walk-in wait-list. Yesterday while patting dry after a shower a loop of towel got caught around the tiny diamond of my new nose piercing, and, unsuspecting, I yanked it and the whole u-post came out. That shit hurt!
I squealed and called for J, and asked him to try to thread it back in. It's infinitesimally tiny, and weirdly shaped; and I was wet, cold, and squirmy, and the bathroom was steamed-up and low visibility; every time the metal pushed into the wound, I cringed, causing J to shudder like he had been winded; and so these rethreading attempts were unsuccessful.
I got dressed and did some deep breathing. I tried to brush my hair which had matted while waiting and my trusty wet brush from N cracked between the handle and the head under my frustration. It goes without saying perhaps that it ended up being a trying and difficult day.
Vibrant, angsty pop punk plays in the lobby. Get debriefed by a sweet person with buzzed orange hair and bright brown eyes lined in a crayony way. Show them the jewelry I have. They only pierce with titanium straight jewelry here, and so I pick out a tiny CZ stud in case they aren't able to taper open the original piercing and thread my gold piece back in. They say that if I do end up needing to have the nostril repierced, I am welcome to come back and have them reinsert the original jewelry later -- they just won't pierce with it.
Mathias pierced me last month at home with a simple needle: he sent straight through, slowly, and then immediately threaded in the jewelry. I wonder how they would do it here. I really hope they can just taper the opening, which has become a teeny tiny purple scab, and put the piece back in. It's not thin skin, and like many people, I heal up very fast. In college, straight up the hill from this piercing studio that sits off Telegraph, I climbed on the sink of a second-floor bathroom in the vegan co-op and gazed into the face of Trixie, a housemate, as she opened second holes in each of my earlobes numbed with ice cubes using a safety pin sterilized with a lighter. Months later, they closed up again within a few hours when I took the jewelry out and left them empty overnight. I repierced them myself easily, a little crunchy on the cartilage but painless, with gold posts.
These earrings I wore for most of my twenties: tiny gold balls from Tiffany, a graduation gift from my parents. I asked for them specifically after taking a senior seminar with Judith Butler and noticing that she wore the same tiny gold balls in her ears every day, with no other jewelry and no other accents to her black and grey wardrobe. I was so starstruck and found her so impressive that I mirrored this style choice for years.
Multiple times I lost the backing of the right one, usually in bed, where I could always hunt for and recover it; but once it somehow got loosed in the coatroom of the National Gallery in DC, and by a miracle I felt for my ear and the gold ball came off between my fingertips where it had been hanging I think in the curls of my hair. I went to a Tiffany in Manhattan shortly after and paid $100 for a replacement backing, which I promptly lost again within the year. I have been securing the right gold ball with a cheapo silver backing from some H&M or F21 set ever since.
Today I'm wearing small perfect flat circles of turquoise set in silver that I bought while on the road with Reggie in the Southwest at the very start of COVID; nothing in Trixie's seconds; the false Peruvian pink opal in the navel (true opal being way too soft). And the teensy gold-set diamond is waiting for me on a sterilized tray back in one of the piercing rooms, and my left nostril continues dutifully to close up as the lobby empties and the whiny punk plays on. The next song that comes on could almost be "The Background" by Third Eye Blind... Ah. It's "What's It Gonna Be."