july 31 2024

Thirty minutes before I have to leave for the airport, I decide I need to get rid of my tongue ring. I’m over it and I need it out. Today. Right Now.

I flick around in my mouth and feel hard metal striking against the back of my teeth. It lives under my tongue, a ring through my frenulum that I’ve had since I was 15.

I remember when I got it pierced. I was with [redacted], my best friend who I was always doing Catholic schoolgirl cityrat shit with. We had started wylin’ out after re-watching Thirteen for the second time. I wanted to be Evie. She wanted to be Tracy. 

I knew I wouldn’t be able to get away with a true tongue ring but this? I could hide it. It would be my secret, my corporeal manifesto, a reclamation of my teen body and will to power or whatever. 

I remember the guy at the piercing studio - a muscular, tatted Jamaican man who never wore a shirt and had his nipples pierced. We walked into his shop in our uniforms, kilts and clogs and all, and he immediately asked us for ID. All you needed back then was your health card, a pen, a lighter, and a little muscle then voilà les putes! A perfectly usable fake ID. We presented our counterfeit cards, giggling. I remember I was chewing gum.

[Redacted] got her actual tongue pierced. I got my web. We walked out of the shop laughing and ate nothing but soup for lunch that whole week.

It’s however many years later and I walk up to Bloor Street and into what Google tells me is a piercing studio. The sign outside reads “Barber Shop.” It’s empty when I walk in and it takes a minute before an older Persian man greets me. 

“You do piercings here?”

He nods. 

“Do you take them out?”

He nods again. 

“Show me,” he says. 

I open my mouth and lift up my tongue. He leads me to a tiny backroom with a desk, a computer, a bed and two chairs. It’s the size of a decent closet. Pictures of his family are plastered on the walls. I look at his computer screen and I can see that I interrupted him while he was online shopping at Harry Rosen. There is one item in his cart: socks. 

He speaks very slowly and quietly. Peering over his glasses, he tells me he’s from Iran. His hands are inside my mouth and I’ve started drooling from the effort to keep it open. 

“Thahsss inthewessstih,” I gargle. He says nothing. Another moment passes and just like that, I’m free.

I stare at the silver ring in the tray, an ancient piece of my history outside of myself. I feel weird. I close my lips and swallow. I move the tip of my tongue across the entire base of the inside of my mouth and I’m shocked by how soft and fleshy it feels. Wet skin and muscle. Saliva pooling against squishy membrane. Nothing in the way between me and myself.

At the height of my adolescent punk phase, I had like fifteen piercings all over my body, most of them hidden. I likened it to a physical representation of psychic armour. Over the years, one by one, I’ve let them all go. The Persian man hands me the old jewelry in a little plastic baggy. I feel suddenly very naked and sensual and inappropriate. 

I thank the man. I pay. I leave. 

I walk home and call a car. At the airport, I check all my bags and walk through security, light as a feather, light as an air bubble. Before we board, I take a double dose of my Ativan and proceed to pass the fuck out for most of the flight. I dream about flying. I dream about singing my songs.

In my dreams, my voice is clear and bright.