One Saturday earlier this year, I bought a pair of beautiful, dangling earrings from Kohl’s. They were a light, robin’s eggs blue, not flamboyant, more with the refined air of an aristocrat. I put them on right when we got on the car with relative ease for my first time putting on new earrings. The whole evening I floated around the house like a duchess, my posture elevated by my bejeweled ears. Before bed, I carefully removed them from my ears, sanitized them, and with an excited smile, I went to sleep.

Do you feel a sense of evil foreboding? I certainly didn’t.

Sunday morning, the first thing I did when I woke up was run to the bathroom to stick in my new earrings. The left earring slipped in with ease, but when I turned to put in the one on the right, I discovered that somehow my piercing had miraculously shrunk overnight. I poked and prodded, but could not get the earring to go through. In a moment of frustration, I used some elbow grease and forcefully shoved the earring into my ear. I did not register the pain at first. But it hit me later like an angry buzzard, like a swarm of incensed bees. Little did I know, I had pierced a new hole barely a millimeter away from the actual hole.

It hurt like hell. I know I’m probably being a big fat baby, and that I’m a disgrace to the Gryffindor house (already am), but a) they were dangly, meaning gravity pulled them down at a force of m*g, and b) they moved every-freaking-single-time that I did. Every step I took, every nod I made, every tiny as-graceful-as-possible sneeze it did made me want to sever my ear off. But I endured it all...till Monday.

I only wore them to school Monday because my mom and I believed that my ear was probably just overreacting to having a different type of metal inside, with a different amount of thickness. We were sure it would get better once my ear got used to them...but it didn’t. In Geography, we learned about the animist beliefs in South Africa, about how everything has a soul.

“If that were true, my earrings would be the most malevolent, wicked, iniquitous souls to have ever roamed this earth,” I whispered to my friend Lilly.

By the time the sun wearily sank down into the soft cushions of the Earth and nighttime had strolled around the corner, I could stand it no longer. Through pain and clenched teeth I pulled out my earrings and had my mother help me put back in my old trusty studs. By the time that whole ordeal was over, my sweater was soaked in sweat, and fingernail prints marked my face. But it was done, and closing the cabinet door, I promised to never wear those earrings again.

Keeping promises isn’t one of my talents though. I did wear them again, once my ear had healed.