Self mutiliation on a beach
I am a bit of a wimp, so I had to get my close friend Kris to help me (you know they’re your real friends when they don’t mind sticking random pointy objects in your lip). We got a 16 gage sewing needle, small I know an earring, some peroxide and a bag of ice and set off towards the only safe place to pierce a lip away from prying eyes: The beach. Now first let me describe to you this beach and how you get there: To get to the beach you have to walk down a small expanse of road till you get to bush, and by bush I mean it doesn’t look like there is any possible way to get there, so you duck under the thorns and dodge the tree’s till you get to a hill, an by now you can see the really tiny beach with rocks and seaweed and no sand straight ahead, getting down the hill is the problem. You have to maneuver yourself down by grabbing the rope tied to a tree and using it to balance you weight, but still, there is no avoiding getting mud on your hands and dirt down your shoes.
So wiping the grime off our hands I removed the ice pack which I had been pressing to my lip for the pleasant burning ‘feels like pins are stabbing me’ affect that would apparently numb the feeling of another needle stabbing into my lip, off of my face and discarded it. We still had some dirt on our hands and removing the needle from the jar of peroxide we got ready to mutilate my lip.
We started off both of us with our thumbs on the needle just purely trying to jab the damn thing into my lip, but that wasn’t going to happen unless I wanted to wind up with a needle in my gum. So I was forced to stick two fingers in my mouth holding my lip open while forcing the needle up from the bottom, unfortunately we should have used marker to determine where we wanted to needle because it wound up just slightly lower than I wanted but it still looked good.
Anyways, by now I could feel the steel tip of the needle poking through my lip, but the thicker part was yet to follow and the ice had basically worn off slightly leaving my lip feeling warm and vulnerable to pain. We counted to three and I took a deep breath, and we forced it through the rest of the way. My lip made a really loud popping noise that caused my eyes to open as wide as you could possibly imagine but the needle was in fact through. We grinned at each other like we had it all figured out and removed the needle before poking the earring through with some difficulty, due to the lack of an actual lip ring this was a good substitute.
Okay, now just to tell you I thought I was actually going to get away with having that earring dangling out of my mouth without my parents knowing, because at the time I was living on a tiny boat and I mean come on. So Kris gave me a hug and wished me luck before setting off back to her house which was fairly close to boat docked in the marina. I got away with the lip ring for about oh say five minutes, and you would not believe the swearing. In the end we wound up with my mom calling me trash, a fuck up, and kicking me out of the house, I with tearful eyes ran to Kris’s house and after failing climbing in through her window, showed up tearful on their doorstep, but never relinquishing my lip ring.
I wound up being forced to go home that night after Kris and I balled our eyes out and I had a shower, thinking coyly I promised my parents I would take out the lip ring tomorrow morning before I went to school, taking it out I let them think they had won, now I may sound like a royal brat right now but just to tell you: You don’t know my story or how horribly every single person in my elongated and close family hates me because they need a scapegoat for their problems. Anyways, I walked to the bus stop where Kris and I re-put the earring back through my lip, which was swelling normally by the hour. I got away with taking it out when I came home and re-poking it back through once every hour for around three weeks, and my lip probably would have been healed faster but I probably agitated it, but whatever, people always doubt our body’s immune system. My parents had cooled off at this point but yet I still didn’t have an actual lip ring, so going to school with what looked like a fish hook hanging out of my mouth was the only good alternative.
I guess one teacher from school called home about how it looked like I had a hook hanging out of my mouth and endure the ridicule of those kids at high school we all seem to hate, my parents let me go one with thinking they didn’t know for a week before confronting me with disappointed looks but saying I could keep it in and they would buy me a real lip ring. I would like to pretend after that my parents and I got a long great, I stopped being emotionally destroying by them every time I got home and there was no more harsh words but that could never happen, but I rely on my friends and constantly remind myself of how strong I am and that I won this one small victory: My lip ring.
