I had a rather strange moment the other day. One of those moments you have a tendency to marvel at for a few fleeting seconds before you shake your head and deny anything ever happened.
At A Glance Author Rachel Contact Rachel@bme.anon When A week ago Artist No idea Studio In Living Color Location Vicenza, Italy Friday I finally succumbed to the terrible pestering itch that has been demanding I walk into the nearby piercing shop of questionable repute and have a man in a lab coat with a two inch plug in one ear shove a hollow needle through the fleshy lip in the middle of my belly.
Now, I'm not predisposed to have much hope for this newest piercing, as I've yet to have a remotely problem free healing hole grace my ever so sacred temple, so the attitude with which I've greeted the little tender thing has been on the whole less than warm and affectionate. Indifferent, really, despite the fact that it is rather striking.
The experience simply lacked the smell of fear, the heavy dread of the appointment, the true gravity of pain, in short the pure divinity that I'm quickly and irreparably becoming addicted to. Not that there wasn't fear, not that it didn't hurt, but the weight of routine hung over the whole affair, to the extent that I felt like a misplaced teenager attempting to reclaim some prepubescent interpretation of womanhood. I enjoy the look of it, the contrast of metal on softer skin than I'm familiar with, the unsettling feeling of running the tip of my index finger over the compromised chunk of skin and feeling the bar underneath, but by no means does it alter the way I already felt about my body.
Nevertheless I'm obligated to care for it. But after dealing with a heinous array of complications, ranging from massive lumps of infected red skin to incessant itches to incredible tenderness that lasts on the order of a full year, I've found that I've managed to become suspicious of any "home remedy" suggested to me while at the same time I've gained an enormous amount of faith in my own body and its innate capacity to roll its eyes at me and right what I've wronged on its own terms.
So I didn't touch my jewelry until the day after the lackluster stabbing, when I decided that it was finally time to expose it to the horror that is running water, and break up the dried blood around the two new little maws on my skin. I pulled off my gauze, and dragged myself into the bathroom with my cleaning supplies.
Now, the written instructions that the piercing place gave me on aftercare sounded sketchy at best. For one, they were not entirely in English. The little slip of paper looked as if it had been Babel fished and printed immediately.
Compounding the problem was the entirely too suspicious bottle of 'solution' handed to me, which had a sterilized, caustic look about it. The rubber stopper could only be bypassed by the incredibly sharp syringe also handed to me, and the label looked like something straight out of a high school chemistry lab. So I figured I would ignore it entirely and practice a diligent LITHA (leave it the hell alone) regiment, no longer trusting anything that the shop had recommended.
That was, of course, until I actually read the label, and discovered that the terrible chemical I had in my possession was actually a 90% solution of sodium chloride and water. Sterilized salt water. Hah hah. Hah. That's funny (...).
In the bathroom I set my tools on the counter. Bottle of suspicious clear liquid with a red label. Check. Plethora of Q-tips. Check. Provon and chunk of leftover gauze. Check. Dangerously sharp and professional looking syringe. Double check. Unsure of how exactly to maneuver the salt water into the syringe, I crouched to my knees on the ground and experimented with several different angles, holding the bottle tipped to the side on the countertop and balancing the syringe up in the air with the strong afternoon sunlight striking off it and radiating off in a completely maniacal looking manner.
It was, of course, at this exact moment that my father decided to pass by the open bathroom door. While it is true he was entirely aware of what I'd done to myself, awareness is no substitute for acceptance. He stopped mid-circuit and stared at me. I froze. Syringe held at eye level, wielded like a practiced weapon, shirt rolled up to my bra line, and a mighty fine company of accomplices that must have presented a scene that convinced him of my frequently latent but utterly inherent insanity. We spent several moments locked in the strangest sort of cease fire I've ever seen. I stared at him, he stared at me. And then he walked away.
We had a perfectly normal conversation at dinner.