"What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?"
At A Glance Author Marcus Contact lusting_vampire@hotmail.com IAM Captainmarcus When Three months ago Location Ottawa -Vincent Van Gogh
Courage is at all times important to a growing person. Even if the courage is no more than bravado, it is still key in shaping the ever-changing smoke pattern that is a persons personality. Courage is what it takes to walk outside and make events happen. Courage is what it takes to push yourself and have new experiences. Because it is easy to stay with your daily actions, but often, if only a by a little, harder to add a new twist to your life.
A school field trip, for me personally, is an example of one of these occasions. I am slightly reclusive and don't get along well with most of my peers, and this was to be the fist trip that I had joined in years. I was excited, to be sure, but also nervous. I was thankfully with Morgan, my best friend. Morgan and I have a tendency to... get into mischief, and I wasn't really sure what we were gonna do with a day at the Supreme Court of Ottawa and the museum of war. I could see no good coming of this. But we broke the rules in a way I wasn't at all expecting.
It was lunchtime. The closet thing we had done to causing mischief so far was getting the entire class excited about all my piercings going through the metal detector and about the surgical scalpel in my bag when we went to the Supreme Court. Everything was checking, nothing was found. My entire group was very disappointed. Morgan and I sat now at a table in a subterranean subways, where we had managed to elude the entire trip group, and where enjoying some relative peace and quiet, when Morgan pulled on of those fake squeeze-on piercings and started putting it on his face. After he was done, I took it and placed it like a septum piercing. Morgan was baffled by how amazing it looked on me, and after discussing it for a while, we both started smiling. (We're the kind of people that you know when we're up to no good, because we have specific faces.)
(It should be known that I was already considering a septum piercing for sometime now, and this was just one of those "Now is the right time" moments)
Suddenly we were wandering the streets, looking for a piercing parlor. (Okay, to clarify things a little, the rules where; we had an hour lunch break. We could do/go/touch/buy anything in that hour. Provided we were back in time to catch the bus to the next event.) We asked around and got from several people completely different directions for shops. We walked up the streets, past windows, cars, gutter punks, dogs... and suddenly it hit us. Gutter punks. I ran back to them, then I handed them a five dollar bill and asked for directions. They happily obliged and sent us on our way. But we had a new problem now. We were running out of time.
Let it never be said that people who are modified don't respect their bodies. That the same as saying black people are all uneducated. And, in our own way, like Martin L. King Jr., we proved that idea wrong. We jogged that last 24 blocks to the piercing shop. Nothing "Olympic worthy" perhaps, but better than most kinds are age can put down easily.
Sweating and out of breath, we walked up to the counter of the open-air piercing shop. Morgan checked his Ipod for the time. We had twenty minutes to get back to the gathering point. We were at least a fifteen-minute jog away. The piercer looked at us and asked me what I wanted. After I told him, we spoke for a few moments, he took me to a small cubicle and put me on a bed. I was not a clean place, and I should have noticed, but I was so excited and adrenaline pumped from jogging that I didn't care. I sat on the bed while he checked my septum for the thinnest spot, marked it, and then put some incredibly foul smelling fish based stuff inside my nose. He was at least very careful, and slow, and calm, which is impressive considering the energy we must have been radiating. He took his time to explain what he was doing and talk to me. I asked about the needle and he told me he would do the procedure at sixteen gauge. Then he picked up the needle, and was just saying "I like the idea of what you-"
He pushed the needle through then.
"guys are-" I didn't hear much beyond that. Nose piercings seem to trigger this bizarre coughing reflex for me. I mostly stared at Morgan. I could feel the needle pushing through my nose and everything. I couldn't stop coughing. We chose a CBR, but left it open so I could hide my piercing at work. (This guy had no retainers or septum clamps). He put it in, we paid, and left. Morgan put his Ipod ten minutes behind true time, and then, with five minutes left, we couldn't afford to jog back to the gathering. We ran. Not full on sprinted, we wouldn't have got far like that. We just ran. And we made it.
My conclusion, and the point of writing this, is that despite the dangerous circumstances, this was my favorite piercing to get, because of the situation. Because instead of calling ahead and making an appointment, I took a chance, and fought hard for this piercing. Because This piercing and its story shaped a part of who I am.