The bagel I broke my tooth on at work wasn’t even hard – that was the humiliating thing. For all I know, that particular lower canine just had had enough of being associated with me. When something like this happens, it’s hard not to take it personally.
In any case, I was totally unprepared to feel something familiar floating in the wrong place. I spat out the bite – my first of the morning – as delicately as I could. And there was half of my tooth: bloodless, inevitable. I hadn’t seen one of my teeth outside of my mouth since I was a kid. Six and twenty-six; I’m taller now, but it felt about the same.
It’s hard to concentrate when the geography of your mouth has changed. (It’s hard to concentrate in 2017, period.) I made an emergency appointment at the nearest dentist’s office, and within two hours I was lying back under lights and mirrors and a stranger’s gloved hands. I’d brought the half-tooth in a Ziploc bag, for reasons that now baffle me. Did I think they could put it back in? Did I think I was a jigsaw puzzle? Maybe I was worried that they’d need proof that I hadn’t always been like this, i.e. wrong-mouthed and imperceptibly broken.
When the emergency dentist took his fingers and his mirror out of my mouth, I swallowed and said, “Do you ever have dreams about your teeth falling out?” This is maybe not good small talk, but the day was already off the rails, and I was leaning into it. Besides, he was a very nice man who hadn’t judged me for bringing him half a tooth in a Ziploc bag.
“Of course,” he said. “All the time.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said, and we both laughed.
Someone else did my filling a couple weeks later and then my check-up, so I haven’t seen my dentist friend since. But I think about that exchange a lot. Even dentists, I tell myself approximately one million times a day, have that fear. It’s okay. It’s okay. And I tongue my reconstructed tooth, which is subtly but definitely different-feeling from its predecessor, to make sure it’s still there. It always is, but I’m never convinced until I feel it. It always is, but every time I bite something, I’m sure I felt it breaking. I’d better check. I’d better check.
When my teeth fall out in my dreams, they all fall out, one by one and then in impossible handfuls. To be honest, I think that dreams are mostly the brain composting its leftovers. To be honest, I still look up dream meanings anyway, hoping one of them will explain myself to me. So far, no luck. And I am running out of places to store the things that come out of my mouth.
I just read the newest John Green book because the reviews made it sound basically like a book about my brain and because my therapist just read it too. And really, what is therapy but a chance to form a book club that’s unusually difficult to tell your friends about?
The most frequently invoked image (no spoilers, it’s literally on the cover) is a spiral. The main character gets stuck in her thoughts frequently and at random, in loops that get smaller and smaller and smaller. The farther down, the harder to describe. The more wordless, the lonelier.
But at one point, she observes that spirals go the other way, too: endlessly moving outward, sweeping up everything. At my best, I’m like that. I can make connections between ideas faster than I can reason my way into them. The words appear and I take them. A friend once told me that I must live five seconds in the future, which remains both the best compliment I’ve ever received and my pitch for a terribly mundane Marvel superhero movie.
If I’m fast, I’m fast in both directions. Here I am, saying the right thing at your party. Here I am, checking my tooth for the fiftieth time, cracking my knuckles till they’re long past sore, returning again and again and again to the same thought, as if I ever really left it.
As a little girl, I had rituals. Of course, I’ve come to understand that little-girlhood is more or less comprised of rituals. Adulthood, ditto. But mine were different, urgent, inexplicable; I always felt that the entire world would go sideways if I didn’t do everything right. This door has to be closed twice. This faucet has to be checked and checked and checked again. This is the moment you have to touch something to prove that you’re real, and so is this one, and so is this one. I was, in other words, a small DSM-IV set loose to agonize itself into any number of beliefs and self-loathings, all of them intensely private and shameful.
The first inkling I had that I was not uniquely wrong and broken was in 2001, when I saw an episode of Invader Zim – one of the few I ever watched – called “Germs.” The plot, which I’ve somehow remembered for all these years, involves Zim donning a pair of germ-vision glasses. His fear, when it arrives, is all-consuming; he spends the remainder of the plot feverishly sterilizing and disinfecting everything he can, though the germs always come back. I think it was supposed to be funny. For me, at ten, it was very serious. How did you know that? I wanted to ask. I didn’t tell you.
I’ve eaten approximately a hundred and twenty bagels since I broke my tooth, and so far, none of them have sent me back to the dentist. I would relax, if relaxing were a thing I did. Who knows? I might still give it a shot.
I’ve had this mantra since I was a kid, sort of like an incantation to ward off bad thoughts, a command to myself to please just be normal for once. It’s shut up, but you have to say it over and over again. Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up. (Or else what? Or else it doesn’t work?) Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to replace it. Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to explain myself to myself the way a friend would. There’s a first time for everything, I guess. This is the year I learn to be gentle with the little girl I still am.
For the record, I am trying out okay. I am getting used to the geography of my mouth with that word in it.
My tiny book club meets tomorrow, and there’s a lot to discuss. It’s not going to be the way it sometimes is, when the words just appear and I take them. So let it be messy. I am no longer collecting my proof in Ziploc bags. I will still exist without it.
I think. I hope. I’ll check.