The Day I Let Go of My Tongue Ring

A few short months ago, I wrote a long, rambling post about how I wasn’t ready to let go of my tongue ring. How I was holding onto it as a symbol of… something. Being cool and young, maybe? I don’t remember anymore. That’s the funny thing about time – things that seem so important, so righteous, so deep…. just flicker and disappear, like everything else.

Or maybe it was the post itself that paved the way. Maybe once I got it all out, read it a few dozen times (I know, it’s lame. I do it with everything I write), let it sink in… Maybe that was enough, it was done. It didn’t matter anymore. The meaning I’d attached to the tongue ring had evaporated.

The idea of taking it out kind of milled around in my mind for a couple of days last week, and then one day I just did it. Totally unceremonious. Took it out and that was that. My mouth didn’t feel as weird as I’d remembered it feeling from the few times I took it out in the previous 16 years. I didn’t feel different. Just a few days of weird movements in my mouth, which I realised was my tongue trying to play with the absent bar, like a small, metallic phantom limb.

And now – what do you know. Nothing changed. I’m still obsessed with cheese. I’m still trying to get my husband to read my mind. I still practice yoga. My values haven’t budged. My one-year-old still seems to think I’m pretty cool.

And so it is done. Onwards!