During my freshman year of college, I did something that I'd been wanting to do for about two years; I got my ears pierced. Granted, this isn't any big deal and really shouldn't have mattered one way or the other, but my parents had laid down a decree that I wasn't to get it done while I was still living at home. Once I was in the college atmosphere, however, I decided that I'd get it done. It wasn't necessarily one of those rebellious college acts that one does, it was simply following through on a previous plan.

At first, I thought it might work best if I just went out to the mall to a piercing salon to have it done, but I never did really feel comfortable with that idea as I dislike malls and I also sort of wanted to go somewhere a little more private. It was a silly sort of excuse, but I didn't want to just be sitting in a store front window getting my ears pierced while teeny boppers walked by with their bags packed full of the latest fashions. My next idea was that I could go to a piercing parlor, but again I didn't really want to go to one of them, either for some reason.

Then, the girl that I was seeing at the time had a great idea; she would do it for me. Upon her first mention of this plan, I really wasn't up for it, but the more that I thought about it, the more that I liked it. Not only could I have it done in the privacy of a room with only two people in it, but this sort of primal act of piercing wouldn't be done in a completely sterile and plastic environment like the mall. Sure, I was a little worried that something could get goofed-up because we didn't have a piercing gun, but it was seeming more and more like an adventure as I thought about it, so I decided to go through with it.

The night arrived for the actual piercing of my ears to take place and I went over to her room as I normally did. Like usual, she'd made sort of a production out of it all and had some candles going and even just the right mood music for the occassion. I sat down on the edge of her bed and she brought over a mirror and a pen. I took the pen and leaned in close to the mirror and measured precisely where I wanted them and made a small dot on the lobe of each ear. I checked each one several times over, just to make sure they were in the places that I wanted them, and finally decided that they were as even as I could possibly get them.

The next part of the whole ritual was a glass of wine for me. I wasn't going to drink myself silly, as I didn't think that it would hurt that much, but I wanted just a slight tipsy-ness, just in case it did. After I'd finished one and a half glasses (with my low tolerance, that's all I needed), I then went to the freezer and took out a cube of ice. It was action time.

I rubbed the piece of ice all over each side of my ear and felt it becoming more and more numb every second. I flicked it with my finger after I'd melted nearly the entire cube down, and I couldn't feel a thing. I told her this and she moved into place with the piercing stud after cleaning it off with rubbing alcohol.

After a moment of positioning it and getting a good grip on the small piece of pointed metal, she gave it a quick push and I felt it go through. Even though it only took a moment in going through, I swore that I could hear it ripping through each little layer of cartilage and skin. With it through, she dabbed away a slight amount of blood and twisted it around slightly in my ear. Then, she pulled the small stud out and we put in a small hoop. We were half done.

After icing up my right ear, she again wiped off the stud with alcohol and moved into position. After giving me the warning, she gave a quick push and I again heard the slight sound of ripping flesh. This time, though, she let out an exclamation and I reached up to feel the stud just kind of hanging there because it hadn't gone all the way through. It was already starting to hurt a bit, so I bit my lip and told her to grab it and push it through the rest of the way. She did, and it was over within seconds.

We repeated the process of dabbing and spinning and replacing it with hoop, and then it was all over. I held up the mirror and looked at the small pieces of foreign metal that were now sticking in my body and they already felt like they were a part of me. My parents didn't even say a whole lot about it.

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