You should have said, "Of course it did," when they asked if it hurt.

Instead, you had said, "Not really. It was an out-of-body experience."

It was as close to phenomenal physical pain as you could even imagine. Worse than the time when you fell on your face in February, swallowing a chip of your tooth, surpassing the weeks you sprained your back in high school field hockey.

You try to be brave. It was mostly a numbing sensation, you tell everyone. You tell some people the way the tears flew down your face, like snowboarders over freshly packed snow. The few that were there when it happened say you scrunched your face so tightly and your knuckles were bone-white.

You remember your chest heaving up and down, a big tattooed man hovering over you with the fattest needle you've laid eyes on. He's cracking jokes, you barely hear them.

"I've been doing this for two weeks now," he tells you, and you say, "Uh huh."

"I'm just kidding," he says, and you say, "Uh huh."

Afterwards, you're looking at yourself in the mirror, and you're not thinking of how hot it looks, or how the hell you're supposed to pick your nose now. You don't want to (but you do). You think of what mom and dad will say. You think of how they're going to look at it and say, "Didn't we tell you 'no'," transporting you to back in the day, when you'd ask for a Barbie or something similar. They will say "Didn't we tell you 'no'," in the same tone, and Jesus Christ, that almost ruins the entire experience.

When you finally (accidentally) take it out, it doesn't even leave a scar, which both relieves and annoys you. You want something to show for the trouble you went through.

You don't want to believe that these things happen. It's like spending all the day at the beach, building sandcastles, then having the tide come crashing in to flatten it all in one fell swoop. It's almost beautiful how that happens. It's a cycle, yet it's unexpected. And each time the tide comes through, you're left feeling like it's happened for the first time.

So what actually happens now is you see a metaphor for this whole experience. You start writing about nose piercing, but really, you're thinking about something else that you can't quite write about yet. It'll take you more time, more than you previously thought, to fully grasp the idea of it.

But that's OK, because you've got other stories to tell. You're working on one right now, and it goes,