piercing
By Harry Mizumoto
fiction | 8.22 min read
i had a weird dream and i don’t exactly remember what it was but in the middle i remember i was scratching the patches on the inside of my elbows and small pricks of red were poking through.
but instead of blood this time they were butts of flowers little stems of roses, tulips, and violets with big leafy petals tickling past the patches of my eczema and twitching out.
like pale veins bluing and then skimming past the lip of my skin. and a memory bubbles like spittle from a newborn — how yesterday my sister told me about piercing her ears when she visited london after talking about it for weeks. i wasn’t physically there but she told me about it afterwards and i imagined her sitting on the surgical bench, eyes trained on the wall and breathing the way the piercing lady, who was reportedly nice and spoke a bit of french and maybe was french, calmly instructed, as the steel slid through her earlobe. and i thought about the way time speeds and collapses and that it must be something like this, a bar of metal puncturing moments into a clean and singular whole, so my mind circles back to my sister and her physicist with her silver pencil as she earmarks a moment by punching two sides into one.
when i woke up i opened the windows to let a little air in, and for the first time in weeks the world felt real to me. it was midday and the light threw a golden square of light onto the bed where my boy twitched in his sleep like a leggy greyhound, his breaths climbing up and down. the world swelled outside as i inspected my arms— angry red lines like fire ants tracing the nocturnal paths of my nails— and i snapped dry clothes off wire hangers. you should go to the dermatologist, he stirred, in the past as i showed him the damages, and somehow this reminded me of the wind bracing him one of the first times we met waiting outside a cafe near university, something sulky and inescapably boyish about his long eyelashes and the fruit of the loom sweatshirt boxing clean across his shoulders. inside the cafe we took a table and ordered coffee and i caught his eyes sliding hesitantly down the glitzy-pinkish sleeveless shirt i wore, sweaty from having stayed at the flat of a girl i’d kissed the night before, a messy space scattered with plants and books on floors. i thought he was beautiful— his knotty fingers rolling up a dirty napkin, the way i told him something and he pulled out a notebook and pen and wrote it down. the precision of his quiet intellect like the nib drilling into the page. etch into me, i said, and in sleep he turned his back against the bedside lamp. so two years flew past and clattered against the wall.
i couldn’t visit the dermatologist (due to lack of clarity as to whether or not i still have access to the nhs and i was leaving soon anyway) so i did the next best thing and clipped my nails over the bathroom sink, digging the clasp into the dirt underneath. i left my phone on the toilet seat as it buzzed: it was my sister—
Did you pack everything
yea … i mean i started
What
cmon don’t shame me on this
u wouldn’t have packed either
Yeah but u r going really soon
i’m leaving on thurs so I still have 3 days
wait 2
That’s 2 days
Omg I’m so jealous
I miss Japan
why are you typing in capitals
I’m on my pone
Phone
are you heading to class
No I have a meeting
ok j be careful
don’t get run over
I won’t !!!!!!
tokyo, with its tall buildings and glossy heeled people which wavered in the horizon, the artificial lighting in the trains moving through me like silence, the blistering heat of sweat in summers with my solitary fan whirring in my room, a reality i could scarcely remember. in the present my arms stung and i took a shower and daubed them with lotion to tame the redness. i was meeting a friend i hadn’t seen in a year at eleven so i had a quick breakfast and kissed the boy and flitted into the sunlight to take a bus to parkway, where she waited with a dark blue coffee mug in hand.
hey sorry! i didn’t mean to keep you waiting
no worries i mostly just got here. how are you?
i’m good, it’s crazy i haven’t seen you in so long
i know, i’m glad i caught you before you go— when are you flying again?
in three days, i’m leaving on thursday
that’s, hang on, that’s friday isn’t it
no wait sorry yeah it’s two days, i keep mixing that up
my friend looked alive— her hair was disheveled in a lively way, and she wore her sweater like a cowl around her arms. she talked about cutting off people and indulging in casual relationships instead and she seemed older and wiser than when i saw her last. i had dreaded going back to tokyo, but when my friend with her well-tousled hair and bright dark eyes chattered about life and flatmates and university, i felt tender and expectant. she asked me about packing, whether it was difficult to shave down the weight of my life in london— paperbacks, ill-fitting clothing, moody docs with fraying laces, left on shelves or hung in their respective corners of the flat— to twenty-four kilograms. and yes, i said, this too, a collapsing of time, the sluicing of knick-knacks into a tessellating whole. the coffee tasted deep and clean, and the spinach pie was flaky and thick. i told my friend silly things about my future like wanting to manage a bookshop or write a book or become a barista in a place like here and she said, why not. we laughed.
when we parted it was darker outside. a feeling which blued in the evenings after something of significance closing mellowed through me, as i walked by the rabble of people and lights in camden, the screech of ambulances careening past. because i knew that, really, when i went back that i wouldn’t be able to live like this— days slung like porches to lean into, deepening connections with friends or making greasy food and netflixing with the boy, play-acting at adulthood. i walked over the bridge just by regent’s canal and felt at a memory just last week, when we met the boy’s parents who were visiting london over a film and talked about it at a dark peruvian restaurant, illuminated with candles and the refraction of bulbous wine glasses, tinged with the titillating and suggestive meeting of strangers. all that potential in a word or glance. the four of us took a night walk to digest the comestibles— the quiet streets and crisp air occluding buildings— before parting into couples, and of course i felt so fucking adult as we walked back and talked more about the film, face aglow with alcohol. it would have been fine only we rode the bus halfway back and i felt a rumbling in my stomach which worsened with every jolt and drilled through as i stumbled out onto the streets and onto the pavement just blocks away from the flat, groaning as the boy, who had been loping forward, hurried back.
what happened?
i literally
i literally just shit my pants
oh, don’t worry, it’s going to be okay
this is horrible
it’s really okay, it’s normal
how is this— i just wanted to go home
yeah, it happened to my cousin once
i didn’t know this could happen
so i waddled back and i’ll spare you the details of the rest, i said to my sister on the phone, later, as she cackled disbelievingly. in the aftermath i sat clean and dumbfounded on the bed, surprised that experience fell in the valence of human life, past infancy and childhood. i wailed and gagged and stood absolutely baffled as my body took over and opted for release— fucking everything spilling out and trickling down my jeans, my boots, the darkly lit street. the smell was so potent, the boy said afterwards, laughing in a kind of quiet way, and still he brought me clothes and checked in every so often as i shut myself up in the bathroom to clean up. and afterwards, everything felt sinewy and sensuous and new, lying in fresh clothes in the bed, fatigued, like someone who had experienced something. i looked up stories of people who had experienced similar things and felt a strange and special kind of solidarity with them.
and obviously it’s not like i loved shitting my pants but i want to remember feeling new and embodied like that, i tried to explain on the call to my sister. some of it was lost in translation— vulgarized by its transferral to language. i arrived back home with chill on my fingertips; autumn was just starting to open. in france, my sister walked around her apartment to get ready for class, the window behind her blanching the screen with white. eventually, when i called her at night in tokyo, it was nice to know intuitively that somewhere it was still morning. and sorry i don’t know if this is getting across, my capacity for articulation is limited, both by nature of language and my slow grappling with words, which is why, when i first opened up iphone notes still warm with sleep to type out the rosy twitching violets from my eczema, some of their colors were already fading. but what i wanted to get across with my boy’s kindness and my friend’s vitality and my sister’s piercing and its recurrence in the story, is that some moments feel good and sure to me, even if the future is unsure, or the world is burning. does that make sense? the moment feels true to me. it feels like something is ending but also just beginning, you know?
