Spontaneous

You don't know a great Saturday night until you've had two people come at your head with pliers.

I've never been very spontaneous, regardless of the fact that I wish I was. After leaving for college, I didn't return home with seven piercings, three tattoos, and a shaved head. Instead, I came back with horrid looking bleached bright red streaks in my dark brown hair. I wanted to do something different, and that was the only thing I felt comfortable with. A week or so later, while at home, I dyed my hair a dark red which simply changed the bright red to auburn. I never saw it fully grow out because my sophomore year I lightened it all to a soft brown/orange for a Halloween costume. And then I dyed it again my senior year of college a dark red, which didn't hold much, after a boyfriend and I broke up. All of these were well thought out and planned, right down to the time period I'd be leaning my head over the sink.

The summer after my senior year of college, I was forced to stay in Tallahassee to take some last minute classes while the rest of my friends traveled or went back to the circus summer camp I taught at the two previous years. It was also the first summer I'd be away from my best friend Lindsay. After growing so accustomed to seeing her every day multiple times (be it at the circus lot, a restaurant, or one or the other's house), I wasn't happy that she was leaving me for teaching a summer camp in Alabama where there wasn't an internet connection nor phone service. I really didn't know what I was going to do.

To celebrate her departure, we decided to do something random. One day, before going to see the movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants for free at our campus theatre (we were big fans of the book series), we decided to get our ears pierced. Not the basic ear piercing, for we both already had that, but the top part of the ear, the cartilage. We were excited, but ultimately scared. How painful was it going to be?

After filling out two lengthy forms ("Are you involved in any extreme sports?" "Um, does trapeze count?") we settled into the grungy small piercing shop's waiting area. We were surrounded by gothic looking posters and dolls with tattoos. I offered to go first, knowing that if I waited any longer, my heart might beat out of my chest. To my delight, it didn't actually hurt too much. As she sat in the plastic chair, Lin asked me what pain to expect. "Kind of like a badly timed leap," I replied, confusing the piercer. Lin and I had our own language, at times, comparing our circus tricks to every day life.

After we left the shop, we felt crazy, dangerous, spontaneous. We didn't plan it out, we just did it! How cool were we with our little silver hoops? Thrilled, we met our friends Jeremy and Grant and went to see the movie.

From day two I had issues with the earring. My skin heals unnaturally quick, which is great when it comes to cuts, but terrible when you want the cut to stay open, as I wanted the piercing hole to stay open. My skin actually tried to heal over the earring, swallowing parts of the edges. After it stopped doing that, the earring just hurt. I couldn't sleep on that side for months. It would get caught in my hair brush. When hairdressers cut my hair, they always seemed to target the ring, like a game, trying to pull it out. Three years later, it still hurt every now and then.

I wasn't sure what made me want to get rid of it. Maybe it was because I was turning 25 soon and wanted to look more mature. Maybe it was because I was sick of the pain. Either way, this past week I decided that it was time for the piercing to go. And that, sadly enough, is where the pliers come in.

The little ring was completely around the tip of my ear, closed by a small ball at the top. The ball was stuck in to the point that you couldn't merely twist it out. I spoke with Jeff about it first, since he used to have the same piercing while in college and removed it himself two months after having it done. His rebellious period was much shorter than mine, clearly. He told me that he did it himself, grabbed his ear and pulled with the pliers. That sounded like quite possibly the worst idea I could think of, so instead I enlisted the help of Megan and Hunter.

Saturday night I sat ridged on our black kitchen stools, hands intertwined on my lap, allowing my nails to dig into the skin, in preparation for the pain. Megan had one set of pliers and Hunter had the other. They pulled the ring apart gently, urging the ball to pop out. "There it goes!" Hunter called as the little silver ball bounced off my knee and hit the tiled floor. As it slowly rolled away, Hunter went looking for it, fearing the cats would mistake it for food. While he did that, I turned the hoop, hoping to pull it free from my ear. Up until that moment, I barely felt any pain and was lightheaded from that realization. Something I feared so much turned out to be relatively easy.

"Ouch!" I yelled and Megan turned around quickly, watching me try to pry the hoop away. Sadly, the opening was too small and the hole started to bleed. "Turn it back around, I'll open it some more," Megan said, so begrudgingly, I did just that, allowing some more drops of blood to cover it. Not caring about the red spots, Megan grabbed my ear and started plying the ring apart some more on her own. This time, it hurt. But this time, it was over. I spun the ring around again and it was off. Holding the small half moon shaped silver wire, I smiled a sad smile.

I found the silver ball before Hunter did.

At first I was tentative about removing the piercing. If it symbolized my and Lindsay's friendship, I didn't want to remove it that quickly and easily because I was bored one Saturday night. But then I realized it didn't, really symbolize anything. If I was relying on a piece of silver to keep us together, I was mistaken. We have memories, we have postcards. We have phone calls and countless amounts of pictures. An earring can't define a friendship. Especially one that was defined many years before it.

And so my one act of spontaneity is gone, a a scrap of trash at the bottom of our bin. I hope to do something random again one day. Take a flight to Boston on a whim. Walk out of work and never look back. Buy a puppy. I will accomplish something, I feel. Because really, an earring is something small. I want to do something HUGE.