On getting a piercing in a foreign country Or: Few words and no blood

I do not speak the language of this country. I have just enough to say excuse me, I don’t speak the language, this food is so delicious, this cabbage is enormous—it’s not enough to say, how much will this hurt? I am too proud to ask in English. 

The woman who brings me upstairs wears a sweater that is functionally just a linked ecosystem of artfully-placed holes. A chain arcs across the button of her nose, anchored by a stud in each nostril. Her skin is so pale that I can see blue veins at her temples; her hair is blonde and shaped like an expensive pastry. She radiates the hunched, gravitational calm of a well-managed hangover. I follow her into her parlor, where she asks me what I’d like done, and I ask her haltingly to put another set of holes above the three that are already in my earlobes. 

She runs a tender fingertip across the plump flesh of my ear. Her face is a few inches from mine. I catch the glint of the light on her slender nose-chain out of the corner of my eye. Her intent focus allows me to be quiet without feeling awkward. My quiet here is not, as it so often has been, a matter of lacking the language; it’s a matter of respecting her work. 

With a tiny, sharp, felt-tipped marker, she draws a dot on each of my ears; then, she pulls back and looks at me hard, her pupils darting minutely between the sides of my face to check for a symmetry that will never be there, because I was born crooked. She asks me in a mixture of languages – some English, some French, the smallest bit of German, many many gestures – about the set of my jaw, the weight of the earrings I intend to wear. I take the mirror she offers so I can check the placement; I ask if one side can be lower, and we discuss the considerations of earrings overlapping, of too much weight on the lobe, of balance and aesthetic. There are long pauses; we trade confusion; I ask how do you say, one of my favorite phrases in any language, a dozen times.

She is considering my appearance with more care than a stranger ever has. She is thinking about how I will age, how I might want to style myself in the future, where I will go and what I will do and how I will look through it all. She is caring about the person I am now and the person I will become.

She asks me if I want to watch the piercing process. I decline—I don’t want to risk flinching when I see her getting close. The little table she wheels over is one I recognize from IKEA. I used to use a similar one for craft supplies. It has a plastic-wrapped surgical tray on top. Her supplies are laid out in tidy rows. She wipes my ear down with alcohol and tells me to breathe.

There is no pain. A pressure, a tug, the strange flossing feeling of a length of thread passing through my skin. The way she pierces me is embroidery. It’s as though she found a gap in the weft of my flesh and passed her needle through it; as though she did not make a hole, so much as she widened one I didn’t know was there. A moment later there’s more pressure, then a click as she fixes the new stud into place. This side is done, she says. Are you ready for the other?

As she works on the other side (press, pull, slide, push, click), heat rushes into the ear she pierced first. It feels like a blush. My ear is developing a fast crush on this new bolt that’s been driven into it. I can feel the heat spreading into my cheek, down the side of my neck – all the blood in my body is coming to investigate, like a school of minnows coming to see what crumbs have been dropped into their pond. I reach up with a finger to touch the new piercing. My body has already made the metal warm.

There is almost no blood from either ear. I don’t know how she did that. I expected there to be plenty – not least because of the glass of wine I drank before coming in. I told her about the wine when I arrived, expecting to be turned away or at least rebuked, but she just rippled her shoulders in a liquid, catlike, somehow extremely European shrug and said ‘of course’.

Looking in the mirror at my ears, which are pink but not bleeding, I think that it looks like the earrings have always been there. Of course there would be no blood; they were just coming home.

“Good? Do you like it?” she asks in the language I barely speak. I nod and smile and say thank you, it’s wonderful, thank you, it’s beautiful. I speak quietly in this language, carefully, in a more feminine register: Uncertainty renders my voice girlish. When I walk out of the room, though—when my boots meet the floor and I feel the blood in my head rush into the rest of my body—there is a new masculinity to my movements. This small weight added to my ears has rebalanced me. I feel sure of myself in a way I didn’t before.

For the rest of the day, there is no pain. A little will come the next morning, when I try to put on a scarf and it catches on the back of a new stud. A little more the day after, when I’m getting ready to board an airplane back to the country of my birth, and I have to re-learn how to put on a mask. But for the first day, it is easy; the change has come naturally; we needed only a few shared words. 

I walk out of the piercing parlor and into the bracing cold. It is January, the sky is grey, rain is moments away. I grin up at the sky, giddy and flushed and new. I am more whole than I was before, and I don’t know how to say that in the language of this place, and I am alive. 

Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is a yearlong essay series in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and examine the objects and experiences that keep us going, even through the hardest of times. The series is free to read, for everyone, forever.

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In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

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