My heartbeat thrums against my ribcage as I step alongside the white walls of Southcenter Mall in Tacoma, Washington. The high ceilings, tiled floor, and pale halls manifest a clinical aura to the space I would typically find opposite. I try to relieve a churning stomach by concentrating on getting my ears pierced at a place that looks so clean because, more than anything, I fear the outcome. I fear infection.
Jed guides me through a maze of clothing and game stores toward the place he’d gotten his ears pierced at nineteen. Eight years ago. Roughly the same age my eldest brother, Matthew, pierced his. I suppose I’m just a decade behind both of them. It often seems like my lot in life—to be somewhat culturally stunted. My therapist says this is common for many gay men and women who didn’t come out in their teenage years. Instead of searching for self-discovery and identity in middle school, we play this game in our twenties.
When I told her this makes sense, seeing as I’m twenty-seven and just now figuring out that I like to wear brightly colored scarves and tight vests instead of graphic tees and zip-up hoodies, she smiled. She told me there’s no shame in my age of exploration, but I still feel like I’m coming late to the world.
“Internalized homophobia is a bitch,” she said to me. I laughed because the truth of her words slammed my ribs. Then, in an effort to explore identity outside of my own homophobia, she told me to do something fabulous this week.
“I’ve wanted to pierce my ears for years,” I told her.
The timing seemed perfect. I was about to fly out to Seattle to visit Jed, my closest friend. He sees me better than just about anyone, and I miss that. He also knows a great piercer here. As we walk the mall’s hallway, I glance to his ears. Diamond studs—it’s what he’s worn as long as I’ve known him. I wonder what kind might look good in my own. Studs, hoops, dangles, barbells, ear threads. Honestly, I just hope they end up being even and straight and clean.
Various scenarios run through my head, not the least of which being how worried I am for the pain of self-mutilation. It’s been a mantra for years: I’m more afraid of getting a piercing than I am of getting a tattoo. Logically, I understand the foolishness of the thought. The pain of the tattooed paws on my chest would far outweigh the pain of a pierced ear. I wonder then if the fear exists because, when pierced, the needle goes all the way through—a chosen wound—a literal hole punched through my skin.
Figure 2.
I know the first evidence of this pierced bodily alteration came 5300 years ago, from Otzi the Iceman who was discovered with pierced ears and sixty-one tattoos covering his body. 5300-year-old body modification. I can’t help but wonder why he wanted to alter his being in such ways. The crisscrossing tattoos lacing his skin are believed to have been crafted by fine incisions followed by pressing charcoal into the wounds. The positionality of the markings show the probability that he obtained the tattoos as a kind of therapy—like acupuncture—pressed into parts of the body that receive considerable wear and tear throughout a lifetime: rib cage, spine, wrists, knees, calves, and ankles. Scientists believe they were a bid to soothe his pain.
Diversely, there are very few theories as to why Otzi may have pierced his ears. I wonder if it was spiritually-driven. Maybe a fashion choice. Perhaps he too fought to alter himself, to become someone new. I want to ask him why, but he died long ago.
I’ve wanted to ask my brother, Matthew, why he pierced his ears in his late teens, but I never have. I was young at the time—nine or ten. I remember thinking the earrings odd because, as far as I understood, only women were supposed to have them. Still, I liked them, wanted them. I yearned to decorate myself, just like him—hair dyed dark, rings on his fingers, ears pierced with studs. I was jealous of how free he must feel.
The freedom I craved is similar to the way Matthew used to sing in the car. We both loved musical theater, and we both took singing lessons from the same teacher, Doris. She taught us how to open ourselves up, to breathe deeply, to never close ourselves off. Matthew seemed to find this space easier than me. He would belt out songs in the car for my mom while I murmured next to him. I didn’t like my own voice. At fifteen, it wasn’t beautiful like Matthew’s. It wasn’t full of vibrato and depth and years of training. Once, while “Empty Chairs and Empty Tables” from Les Miserables blasted through the car’s speakers, my mom called from the front seat, “I want to hear both of you sing.”
But he nudged me. I glanced to him, meeting his eyes, so alike to mine, and he smiled. “Remember what Doris says. We have to open ourselves up.” When I sank further into the seat, he placed his arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. “I’ll sing with you. Don’t worry.”
And he did.
And for one of Doris’s recitals, Matthew and I performed a duet from the musical, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, called “Both Sides of the Coin.” Previously, it had been hard for me to take the recitals seriously. As a teenager, I was so obsessed on trying to fit in with my friends that practicing daily like Matthew seemed nonsensical. He would sit for hours each night, practicing at the piano, his voice filling the house like the scent of his morning coffee. That apathy changed when I got the chance to sing with him; I wanted to do it well forhim.
We practiced in the family room of our childhood home. He would play the piano and , together, we’d sing out the words:
I am not myself these days - for all I know I might be you.
There's more than room enough for two inside my mind.
I am likewise in a haze of who I am from scene to scene;
What's more we two, (we four, I mean) are in a bind!
For is it I or is it me?
Matthew also choreographed a dance for the song. We twisted around each other, he and I—two brothers, ten years apart, dancing together, laughing at the absurdity of the lyrics, tripping over each other’s feet. I didn’t know at the time that he suggested the song to Doris because he wanted to show me how much fun it could be to sing and dance—that maybe I’d open myself up to the possibilities of freedom musical theatre could bring.
Because of Matthew’s strength and positivity, I also didn’t fully comprehend the battle he’d gone through to survive his own narrative. At fifteen, I didn’t know the depth of how Matthew had dropped out of Brigham Young University after his first semester, how he’d fallen into a meth addiction. How he’d been diagnosed HIV-positive. How he’d spent years relapsing, getting clean, relapsing again, getting sober again, going to AA, doing everything he could to survive. Because I was the youngest member of my family, Matthew and my parents sought to protect me from the truth. And so, I knew the truth as a separate being from the brother who worked so hard to sing and dance beside me.
Five years before our duet, when I was ten, in the midst of Matthew’s hardships, my mom called me into her bedroom. When I neared her bedside, she reached out to me from under the covers. She and I both have bad circulation, so we both pile blankets over ourselves to keep warm. Matthew has this too. Our round faces are also reflected from my mother’s. My family refers to these things as the Godfrey Gene—Godfrey being my mother’s maiden name. This isn’t the only thing we joke about being passed on. Empathy too; forgetfulness; other, less definable, things.
My hands were cold as I threaded fingers with my mother’s warm touch. She liked to hold my hands when we talked as if it was her way of being connected, something I could mimic myself. But I wasn’t paying attention to her hands; I looked deep into her eyes. I could see my reflection in her irises.
After asking me how I was doing, she paused, and I sensed her battling with herself. It was as if something was fighting to get out of her, but she didn’t know how to release. She removed one of her hands from mine and placed it atop our pile of fingers, her warmth spread over my skin. “I just wanted to talk to you about something.”
I kept staring into her eyes, letting my reflection in them blur. “Okay.”
She paused again. She leaned in toward me and smiled. “Well, it’s just, you know Matthew’s gay right?”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes and smile too. “Well, I kind of figured.” Matthew had been bringing his boyfriend around for a few months at that point.
She laughed. “Yes, well, we thought you knew, we just wanted to make sure.”
I laughed beside her. It died out quickly, and we’re both silent for a moment. She studied me. Searched me. Tried to close the distance.
“You’re not though, are you?”
The question rang from her in something just louder than a whisper.
“No. No,” I said instantly, shaking my head, as if I’d been trained for the question. I couldn’t be gay. I knew what being gay meant: boyfriends and tattoos and cigarettes and drugs and alcohol and piercings. It meant families being broken apart and older brothers disappearing on younger brothers. So, no, I wouldn’t be gay.
Figure 3.
Perhaps my gay brother marked my association with gay men wearing earrings—as if piercings could be a calling card to recognize one another. And, even after I came out at age twenty, I still fought to avoid any further association with the culture of being flamboyantly gay. Perhaps it’s why I started out as a Musical Theatre major my first semester of college and then switched to English quickly after. It seemed less obviously gay.
And this idea bled into others. Perhaps I believed I could be the good gay son, the one to be proud of. I determined early on that I would never drink alcohol. Or smoke. Or get a tattoo, or take drugs, or pierce my ears.
Even within this decision, I sought to understand more about the culture I was suddenly existing within. I researched the history of homosexuality in the library of BYU, the same school that Matthew dropped out of years before. Alongside discoveries of Harvey Milk and the Stonewall Riots, I found an article discussing the fad of piercing ears as a way of identification. The article, published by the New York Times, claimed that gay men in the late 20th Century began piercing their right ears, hanging a single article of jewelry as an indication of their sexual identity.
One gay man living in New York at the time explained how, “in a world where you can’t dress flamboyantly, that’s a very discreet signal.”
Still, the idea that a pierced right ear could equate homosexuality has been argued for years. A sound technician in Chicago thought the whole idea was “stupid,” and that it seemed as if the rumor was yet another stereotype for gay people so others could “spot the faggot in the room.”
Skimming through the article, I subconsciously lifted a hand to my right ear and pulled down the earlobe, stretching my skin. After rubbing the flesh between my thumb and forefinger, I pinched down with chewed fingernails. A shot of pain—I gasped and released.
I suppose I felt the duality too. I wanted to distinguish myself as a man who loved men, but an image had been branded into my mind—my brother—a gay man with dyed brown hair, a love for musical theatre and writing, and pierced ears. But I refused to be like him, to reflect his process. And, for a long while, because we didn’t speak of these things, I believed my parents’ suffering came from his being gay. But that had never been an issue for my family.
After Matthew moved back into the upstairs bedroom of my parents’ house, after he’d broken up with his first boyfriend and his second boyfriend and he’d started dating Kyle, I lived in the basement. Matthew made coffee most mornings, the smell of beans filling the house. After waking to the scent, I found my father in the kitchen making breakfast and immediately asked where Matthew was, marking the coffee dripping into the pot on the counter. My father gestured to the snow-covered backyard. I made to go find Mathew and bring him in from the February chill, but my father told me to stay inside.
“Matthew needs time alone.”
I think a small part of me understood his meaning—that the smell of coffee wouldn’t be strong enough to cover up the rest, but I didn’t like imagining him sitting alone in the backyard, in the cold, with nothing but his own thoughts to surround him.
I didn’t see Matthew come back inside. I only heard the shower run before I snuck outside. I don’t know what I wanted to understand, what I hoped to gain from the knowledge, but I walked out—down the small alley at the side of our house where weeds sprouted from the brick-lain ground, down to where I found a carved tree stump. Cigarette butts littered the snow, ash lying atop the scuffled white powder.
I could almost see him there, sitting on that stump, smoking his cigarette, drinking his coffee in his plaid blue pajama bottoms he’d gotten two months ago for Christmas. Alone. And I wondered what was worse: the fact that he was alone, or the fact that nobody told me why.
I believe this to be my initial understanding of addictions that dug deeper, stronger, more destructive. My brother’s suffering, the battles he faced with methamphetamines, the tension he had with my parents, his partners, with me—it would all be hushed up and hidden away. Most information I would find piece by piece, discovered by sheer will to understand.
But Matthew didn’t stay in the house for too long that time—though I don’t remember where he went next. I don’t know if that leaving was the time he moved in with Kyle. I don’t know if it was when he went to the recovery house in Boise. I assume the latter because I remember he stole the prescription drugs in my parents’ bathroom cabinet. Even after he left, they kept their medications in their bedroom closet instead—a door that could lock.
Figure 4.
Jed and I rise up the escalator of Southcenter Mall to the second floor. The pungent assorted scent of melted cheese and teriyaki is lessened up here, and I’m grateful. My stomach can’t handle much more nausea. I can’t help but fear how my parents will react to the holes in my ears, to my claim of self-identity. Twenty-seven, and I’m still righteously conscious of how my parents could react to my choices, especially the ones that looked like Matthew. I imagine it in their eyes—the fear—the unbridled tension of knowing I’m not my brother and realizing how much I look like him. Our off-blonde hair, red beards, round faces, stockier bodies. The way we both love musical theater and writing. The way we laugh. Our homosexuality. I dread seeing a flash of unsettling in their eyes, a fear of how easy it is to disappear.
When Matthew got Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man tattooed across his back, I don’t recall who didn’t want me to see. At my grandparent’s house, my brother took our uncle and my parents into a separate bedroom in order to show them the artistic choice. I stayed in the kitchen with my grandmother. I don’t think anyone expected me to be so curious, to wonder where my brother had left with the other adults. Maybe there was a hope I wouldn’t care. But I slipped from the kitchen. With four siblings and many more cousins, I’d learned long ago how to blend in and disappear.
The door was open. I saw multiple bodies surrounding my bare-backed brother. Glancing between shoulders, I saw it: the creasing black lines. A man with four legs and four arms stretching to the outside of a circle. I didn’t know Da Vinci back then. I didn’t know how when a tattoo needle touches bone, the pain is excruciating. I didn’t understand the pain Matthew must have gone through as the needle swept across his spine to craft the Vitruvian Man on his back. All I knew was that it was beautiful.
My uncle saw me first. “Andrew!” he shouted in surprise. I jumped, startled. My eyes locked with my parents before landing on my brother, meeting the expression peering over his shoulder.
He slipped his sweater over his back and turned to me, smiling guiltily. “We didn’t want you to see,” he told me.
My mother pulled me aside later that night to talk. “Are you okay?” she asked me.
“I’m fine.”
She hesitated.
“Now, don’t you go getting one, okay?”
I met her eyes, sensing the fear, seeing the pain. I couldn’t do that to her. I would never do that to her. “I promise.”
At twenty-five, I got my first tattoo: paws imprinted above my heart, made from the prints of my first dog, Lance. It was my way of honoring him. He’d died too young, hit by a car on a late January night.
When I called my mother to tell her, I rapidly explained how the tattoo meant something—it wasn’t just a needle I threw against my body because I wasn’t satisfied with it. She laughed and told me she knew that.
“I don’t know why you were so afraid to tell me,” she said. “I’m not upset, Andrew. I love you.”
I hope she’ll believe the same of these earrings, that I’m getting them for a reason. That I’m discovering myself. Though, I wonder why there should even need to be such a reason. Still, if I can persuade my parents, then maybe I can persuade myself that it’s different from Matthew. That I’m different.
Figure 5.
The day I left for Seattle, my father drove me to the airport, and I admitted to him for the first time my fears of becoming like Matthew—of how I’d hidden myself and my identity away because I didn’t want to become him.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he told me.
“I know.”
He considered me for a moment before continuing. “I know how that feels though. I felt that with my older brother. I think maybe it’s an inevitability of the younger sibling—to want to break free.”
I was quiet then, digesting the words, a question I’d wanted to ask for years bubbling up inside me. I had never asked because any conversation that had to do with Matthew’s addictions felt off-limits. As if we might be able to pretend the problems never existed if we just pushed them down. And yet, I knew that was the issue—that being closed-off had caused so much pain.
“Did Matthew ever disappear? Did he ever run away?”
My father looked perplexed, and so I told him I had this memory of absence, and how it’s confusing because I wasn’t sure if it actually happened. I felt it was easy to remember the moments he was there, but I didn’t know how to remember a hole.
No, he never really disappeared,” my father said. “Though, he did drop out of BYU after a semester when you were nine or ten. He didn’t tell us.” He explained how maybe through the secrecy and drugs, it may have felt like Matthew wasn’t around as much. I told him it makes sense, but I knew I was lying.
After arriving at the Salt Lake City Airport, my father hugged me close. It felt like he was trying to tell me something in the embrace, and I tried to hold onto it.
But I didn’t understand how my brother could have been absent enough that I convinced myself he wasn’t there at all.
Figure 6.
Jed describes pierced ears similarly to the more recent relapse and disappearance of my brother in 2019. Jed claims there’s immediate pain, but after about a week, I shouldn’t feel the metal-filled hole in my earlobe. I’ll forget about the absence. I hope it’s true. I ask him to remind me of this as we arrive at BJP, the place where I’ll be pierced.
He whispers it to me again outside the doorway. “It’ll heal, Andrew.”
I nod, staring at the floor-to-ceiling windows of the tattoo and piercing shop. The doors are wide open. I can see, even at a distance, that the store is full of glass. Glass cases. Glass cabinets. A hundred different mirrors. I appreciate the transparency.
Still, I stop for a moment when we move into the store. Fear bubbles inside my stomach, the terror of what it means to do what I’m doing. Jed stops beside me. He must feel my hesitancy. He knows why this is hard. He understands the complexity.
“You don’t have to do it, you know,” he says. “You can wait. Maybe try some clip-ons first.”
I meet his eyes, but quickly slide to the diamond studs in his ears. I want to be that brave. That free. The idea of falsehood rattles me.
“No.”
I march to the glass counter in the center of the store, sweeping past the things that might distract me: Harry Potter backpacks, snowflake necklaces, Pokemon socks, and tattoo books. The girl at the counter smiles at me when I arrive in front of her. “How can I help you?”
Before I lose the courage, I say, perhaps a little brashly, “I need to pierce my ears.”
“Of course.” She sweeps some loose hair behind her left ear, simultaneously pulling forms from beneath the glass counter. “Where on your ear would you like to get pierced?”
I mark her assortment of earrings, uncovered by hair. It’s as if she’s giving me options, and I can count four. Two lobes, a daith, an industrial. “Just the lobes,” I tell her. She nods and hands the forms to me.
I wonder if I’ll want more than the lobes someday. I hear the others hurt more and take longer to heal than a simple hole in the earlobe. Breaking through cartilage is much more painful than simply carving away some skin.
“You still use needles right?” Jed asks. “Not a gun?”
The girl laughs. “Yes, yes, we use hollowpoint needles.”
Hollow needles. I’d done the research on them. I’d heard rumors that piercing guns were more dangerous and ended up hurting more, so instinctively, I wanted the needle anyway. In addition, while guns punch through the ear, pushing the skin apart by sheer force, hollow needles are, in fact, hollow. Instead of pressing away the skin, it actually cleaves away a fraction of the ear. This creates a space for the jewelry to exist. It crafts a clean hole, allowing room for the wound to drain and, someday, heal.
Needles have historically been the preferable approach to create a hole in the body. And perhaps what frightens me so much is the idea of not being able to go back—the permanency of the act. Jed tells me that if I don’t like them, I can just remove them and let the hole heal over. I don’t have to keep the space if I don’t want to.
I know this is true because Matthew pulled his out at some point. I don’t have any recollection of when he did it, but I know by the time I came out as gay to him, they were long gone. I, at times, wonder if I somehow imagined him having them—like I imagined his absence when I was ten. But I don’t think so. If I took a closer look, I’m sure I’d see the white pinpricks of scarring where there had once been space. He’s closed himself off.
The night I came out to him, I was much too distressed to care about pierced ears. Matthew was living with his partner, Kyle, in Salt Lake City at the time, and I was living at home with my parents—a twenty-minute drive away. He’d come for dinner, and I had just finished screaming at him because he told me not to join a multi-level marketing investment with my friends. At nineteen, I knew the foolishness of joining, and yet, Matthew’s words of caution had left me laying on my bed, sobbing, screaming into my pillow.
My mother came into the room and held me for a long time before asking, “Andrew, what’s really going on? This isn’t about Matthew. This isn’t about that pyramid scheme.”
More weeping, more screaming, more utterances of I can’t say I can’t say before I finally broke enough to speak the words, “I think I’m gay.”
She immediately pulled me close to her and held me with everything she had. She stroked my hair and let me weep into her arms, her sleeves drooping under the weight of hot tears. “I love you, Andrew,” she said to me. “I will always love you. That will never change.”
When I finally was able to pull myself up and look at her, I found that she was crying with me. She asked if she could bring my father and brother in. She’d later say that the coincidence of Matthew being there on that night wasn’t a coincidence at all, that maybe things happen for a reason.
When I told Matthew, he didn’t say a word at first. Like my mother, he wrapped his arms around me, hugging me tight. I wondered if he wanted to protect me from all the pain he’d gone through, all the horrors his life threw at him.
He whispered into my ear, “No wonder you’ve felt so alone.”
When we parted, I stared into his eyes, also wet with tears. I felt his closeness, felt the way he loved me, and we saw each other in that moment, connecting in a way we never had before.
Figure 7.
I wasn’t close-by Matthew when he relapsed in May 2019. I was working for theme parks in Orlando, Florida; he was a professor at a university near Chicago. We hadn’t talked in a few weeks, so I didn’t know what to make of a text to my family’s group chat where Kyle stated that he smashed Matthew’s phone with a hammer. I thought it was a joke, that I had missed something, and when I asked what it meant, nobody answered right away.
It took a half-hour for my brother, Marcus, to text me, to explain that Matthew had started using Meth again. He had used his phone to find drugs, so Kyle broke it. Marcus told me to call our parents if I want to be filled in more.
When I did call them, they told me that Matthew relapsed again and had gone missing two weeks earlier. He’d come back, but he’d disappeared after Kyle had smashed his phone. I wondered if it was things like this that made me believe he had disappeared during my childhood.
“Why didn’t you tell me he left?” I questioned my parents.
“It wasn’t our place to tell you, Andrew,” my mother said.
“This is Matthew’s thing,” my father added.
“But he would never tell me.” My tears fell heavy. I’d heard all the stories—the ones where the brother relapses, where they find him days later overdosed in a bathtub in a stranger’s apartment. I wanted to ask them, what if he dies? But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know if the hesitation resulted from fearing their answer or from fearing their inability to answer at all.
I learned later that week that I’d been accepted into a graduate school in Utah. I’d wanted to call Matthew before anyone. I’d wanted to tell him that I’d made it; I’d made the decision to change my life for the better like he had when he’d gone to graduate school, but I was halfway through the ringing before remembering there was no one left on the other end. My mother told me to call Kyle. Matthew had come home, and Kyle could hand him the phone.
I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Two months after Matthew’s relapse, Marcus joined me in my trek from Florida to Utah. He set up a time to meet up with Matthew and Kyle in Illinois as we made our way across the country. They’d initially asked if we wanted to stay with them a night, but when Marcus looked to me, I shook my head.
I’d cried along the drive. I hadn’t talked to Matthew since he’d relapsed. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so, and in the past, I had always been able to talk to him afterward. I had always wanted to talk to him any chance I had to do so. In fact, it meant everything to me to be someone he could turn to in pain. And he’d be the same for me. Even though I was in Florida and he was in Illinois, we could be there for each other. The relapsing had never mattered in the end. He’d always come back.
But something between anger and pain swelled in me at the thought of seeing him. Of talking to him. I wondered if he’d recognize the pain in my eyes, the way I’d stayed up all night when I learned he’d gotten a new phone and my parents said he would try and call. I wondered whether he’d even remember that he didn’t. I wondered what I’d feel when I saw him. Guilt. Love. Pain. Sick. Joy. Relief. Fear. Anger.
“Why is it different this time?” I asked Marcus on the drive, the hills sweeping past us on the other side of the car window.
“I don’t know,” he told me. “I’ve been trying so hard to keep talking to him, to be there for him, but I don’t know how anymore.”
I could hear the pain in his voice, the longing so alike to mine. “He hasn’t called me,” I told Marcus. “I thought he would call me.”
“Have you tried calling him?” he asked me.
“No,” I said, still staring out the window, feeling tears drip down my cheeks. “I don’t want to be the one to reach out this time. Why do I always have to be the one to call first?” I hadn’t said these words out loud before, and the honesty stung.
“That’s really fair,” Marcus said. “I call him because I know he won’t be the one to call me. I guess to me, being in contact, reaching out, is the best way I can help him.”
It was the same thing I thought every time previously, but this time felt different. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t reach out to him when I’d heard about graduate school, and suddenly I felt what it might be like if he died. Perhaps it was pride. Perhaps the pain was just too palpable, the anger of his selfishness too real, the memory of his selflessness too foreign.
“I don’t want to see him,” I tell Marcus, the pain of my own selfish thoughts piercing me deeply, making me cry harder. “This isn’t love. I know part of him loves me, but this isn’t it. He can’t disregard his own life and love me at the same time.”
Marcus didn’t answer, and I wept more. Harder. I sputtered out the words, “I want him to know what it’s like to lose a brother.”
We met Kyle in a Costco parking lot that same day—Matthew was running late. He wasn’t living with Kyle anymore. They’d separated after Matthew’s relapse and after Kyle had smashed Matthew’s phone with a hammer. I was sure there was more to the story.
When Matthew finally arrived, he wasn’t alone. Another man had come to drop him off. Matthew clambered out of the passenger seat of a rusted, old, green Toyota. He walked around the car, dropping two large duffle bags on the asphalt, and embraced Marcus in reunion. His hair had grown longer, more wiry. It seemed redder than I remembered, but maybe there was simply more of it than before. His red beard had grown out too, covering up most of his face in a twisted tangle of hair.
When they parted, he turned to me. I didn’t know what to do with the feeling that I didn’t want him to walk toward me. It was utterly foreign and unrecognizable. There’d never been a moment in my life that I hadn’t wanted to run toward my brother and embrace him. There’d never been a time I’d felt this kind of unease, this want to turn away. To go back. To hide. To disappear.
But he walked toward me, and I hugged him. A scent of alcohol and smoke and something unrecognizable reached out to me. His beard scritched across my neck. His brown leather jacket somehow felt cold against the mid-July heat. And we parted. He looked into my eyes and said he missed me. I told him I missed him too. I stepped back, creating a bit more space between us.
Figure 8.
I can create space by crafting a hole—one that can be filled with an assortment of different materials. Silver and gold are the most common nowadays. Throughout history, different materials filling the gaps had different meanings. For instance, the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas pierced septums with gold and jade to symbolize the water and sun gods. In Italy, it was once believed that simple metal could keep demons from entering into the mind through the ears—that maybe the space could protect them.
It makes me wonder whether it actually matters when the girl behind the glass case asks me what kind of earrings I want in my own pierced lobes. There isn’t much choice really. Just two kinds of studs. One, a metal bar with a tiny ball at the end. The other, the same, but it has the faintest shine of a diamond inside the ball—a little light inside the metal. That one costs five dollars more.
I choose the regular ball, the one without a faux diamond. That’s not the important part in the end. What’s important is the metal bar, the one that will hold my skin apart, the one that will fill the hole.
After filling out the paperwork, they take me to the back room. It’s small—a tight but comfortable space. A padded table, much like the ones in hospitals and massage spas, stands in the center of the room. A man sits by the head of the table, a small tray of silver tools beside him. The girl has me sit on the table and face her. With a small toothpick-like pointer, she pricks my ears with an inky material and tells me to look in the mirror.
“Make sure they’re even and where you want on the earlobe.”
I look into the glass at my own reflection. I reminisce on when I looked in a mirror at a puffy-eyed boy who had just realized that he loved men instead of women. I’d wept into that mirror before finally uttering the words, You’re gay, at my own reflection. The moment had been one of release, of understanding, of freedom. I wonder what I’ll feel after this piercing. This intentional wounding. I wonder what it can do for me.
Susruta, a great Indian surgeon, advocates ear-piercing by saying that it prevents diseases like hernia and hydrocele. There are those who say it might prevent hysteria and other diseases. There are even some who say the flow of spirit in the human body is maintained by wearing earrings. That maybe we can find peace by opening ourselves up.
There are those who wonder if, before written communication, before words, letters, and pictures, maybe we pierced our bodies as a form of communication. That maybe I could tell you something by the way I crafted holes into my own being. That maybe you can understand me in the spaces of my body.
And when I can’t find a way to call my brother on his birthday, my mother will tell him to call me. And he’ll tell me that he’s fallen in love with a partnered couple who have taught him that he can have a healthy amount of meth. This will be the last time I talk to my brother before I pierce my ears. He won’t reach out, and neither will I.
And when my therapist asks me what we need to talk about each week, I will keep telling her that I’m trying to understand my own identity—that I’ve covered up my being in becoming an antonym of my brother. That I yearned to be the good gay son. That I can’t tell my parents that I drink alcohol because I’m so afraid that they’ll think I’m becoming my brother. That, somehow, my being equates his addiction. That I might become the absence.
So, when my sister calls my parents while I’m in the room and she mentions that Matthew isn’t coming around for Thanksgiving because he’s using again, I’ll think about how he’s also lost his job at the university where he taught undergraduates about theatre, and I’ll stay silent. After she hangs up, my mother will hold her face in her hands. I will hold back a response similar to saying, I’m not really surprised.
But when I think of earrings and piercings, I’ll never be able to forget that he had them too and that he removed them at some point that I don’t recall; and I’ll think about how I created space and he closed himself up; and I’ll remember, like how he transformed from a pierced brother to a scarred brother, he also became someone else before Kyle smashed his phone.
And I’ll think of the article disputing gay men using earrings to identify themselves, and how there is a quote from a woman with a pierced tongue, saying, “You’ll feel it all the time. You know that you’ve done it with every word you say.”
And when my therapist asks me what I’m most afraid of, I’ll tell her it’s that my parents will call me to tell me my brother has died. And I’ll tell her that my worst fear is that it won’t hurt because the brother I recognize is gone. And I’ll tell her how this feels like a betrayal. And I’ll weep, and she’ll tell me it’s okay to feel this way, but I’m not sure if I’ll believe her.
So, when I lay down at that table and the bearded, tattooed, black-capped man tells me to breathe in, I do. And I think of how, when I breathe in, I might be breathing in at the same time a child takes their first breath in the world. And when he tells me to breathe out, I hope my brother can breathe out with me.
And the hollow needle carves through my earlobe, removing enough skin to create the space I need. He fills the hole with metal so my ear can heal around the wound.
When he finishes with both ears, I look back into that mirror, and the girl asks me, “What do you think?” I don’t answer. I stare into my reflection. My eyes sweep from ear to ear; I try to take in the studs, the small metal balls without diamonds, and my eyes water.
And when Jed laughs lightly, saying, “I think he likes them,” the girl laughs too. And I smile, nodding because my words cannot express the feelings inside. But I feel like they understand.
And when my parents pick me up from the Salt Lake City Airport days later, they’ll hug me and tell me they missed me, and I’ll see them glance to my ears. I’ll wonder if they have a flashback to a different gay son. But then I’ll see them smile, and they’ll compliment them, and I’ll know that they see me.
But I am not there yet, and none of that matters now. Because when Jed and I leave JBP, I run to the bathroom. Jed laughs as I run. “You just want to see your earrings again.” And I agree.
I stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror of a mall in Tacoma, Washington, and I don’t recognize myself. It’s a different Andrew. An alternate Andrew. A boy unafraid of holes. And there’s something like mourning in my eyes. Maybe more like liberation. Maybe more like joy. But I see it there: the space between selves, between my body, my spirit. I lean in closer, the stone counter pressing into my stomach. I don’t care. I just want to see a little better, to feel a little closer.