mouth

I never brush my teeth. Well not “never” as an absolute. 

Of course before special dates when I know the facade behind my bleached teeth won’t be convincing enough, due to the snitching stench of proximity.

I suppose I never made a habit of it as a child. I’d lock the bathroom door and let the sink run while I held my finger down on my automatic toothbrush. It was programmed to play a Justin Bieber song to the  time-recommended brushing period. I still wince at the song Baby when the early 2000s throwbacks bleed from the radio. My parents of course grew suspicious. To combat this, I would spread a line of red white and blue kids toothpaste across my tongue and swish it around. I might as well have brushed my teeth by the time I perfected my rehearsed routine of deception. Let it be known that I passed the “breath test” every time with a straight face. 

My dirty little secret. Disgusting I know. Except it never seemed to bother me. It became my new normal. One that I created and controlled. My sisters who religiously brushed their teeth got more cavities than I ever had throughout my upbringing. I believed that enough bacteria was healthy to avoid sickness. Antibodies or something I overheard adults talking over. My six year old logic was that if cavemen got by without meticulously minting their bones, that I would get along just fine. There’s fluoride in the water anyway. 

My smile is one that captures the attention of strangers. I suppose I am doing something right. I’m sure the seductively sweet dimple that decorates my left cheek gives a few points toward the overall experience, but my teeth have been specifically complicated. The second I got my braces off in the summer of 8th grade, I proceeded to fry my fragile teeth raw with whitening strips my mother kept stashed away behind a box of super plus tampons.

My teeth winced under extreme cold or hot conditions. Icewater made the nerves in my canines howl. Hot tea made my gums so sensitive I thought they would end up melting down my teeth. It was a pain I could tolerate for the trade of subtle appreciation from strangers. It was a problem I grew extremely conscious of. But I couldn't help but lie through my teeth. My mouth was a trojan horse of every nasty thought that left my lips in sweet words. No one cared to see past this facade. They smiled back. 

I believe it was these elementary secrets that began my series of compulsive silences throughout my childhood. I found peace in that I was not lying. I just omitted certain truths that I knew, when they were verbalized, would become real. I enjoyed the internal limbo of feeling but never communicating.

I walked around suffering the paranoia of an imposter. Knowing the interiority of myself was grazing my tongue over my teeth, to feel morning plaque cemented between the cracks of my teeth. Guilt of negligence festering like cavities slowly browning in the belly of my molars. 

I once asked my mother, “if you never ate food, would you still have to brush your teeth?” My child hypothesis played into the logic that no food correlates to no bacteria, thus no cavities. She laughed in response. “Never eat on your first date. I am surprised if a boy would ever kiss that mouth at all”. This bothered me for the fact that she didn't seem to answer my question at all. I just stood adjacent to her with my head down feeling as if my ugliness had been exposed. Perhaps I wasn't good at controlling my secrets at all.

My mouth is where I consider my state of mind resides. It is the essence of how I have always felt a dirty rot lingering within the darkness of my insides. When my mind cannot process, its entropic force is relocated down to the grinding of my teeth. 

Disassociation is often described as a loss of connection between thoughts, memories, feelings, surroundings, behavior and identity. Most people describe dissociation as zooming out. Leaving the body. I find myself imploding. Slowly spiraling into myself until I am nothing more than a fetus blinded by the warm womb of sensations. No thoughts. Simply embryonic fluid whispering sweet lullabies that whatever I am experiencing will pass. 

I find myself in the small cavity of my mouth often. I see my mouth as a small 3 by 2 inch room. Carpeted in the fuzzy rug of my dehydrated tongue. A ruby red uvula hanging from the ceiling like a droplet of a chandelier. The gates of the door are made of ivory tusks. It is the purgatory of thought before words leave my lips, and it is the secrets I swallow in between sips. It is always dark. Unknown and elusive. Somewhere my eyes can never contort to look inside.

I am not sure why I am choosing to write this. I can understand sensations, and emotions to an intellectual extent, but it all feels verbose, and too much to swallow. So I type rather than speak, and write pages of persuasion because I feel when the words leave my lips, they will be intrinsically tainted with the traces of my DNA. My mouth is what makes things real. Flicks of my tongue communicate sounds that the human ear can hear. I suppose this is a story about intimacy. Why I find it terrifying. And why I tend to feel all of the sensations to distract me from actualizing real connection. I am always in my head. Words caught on the tip of my tongue. 

Someone once told me that the tissue on the side of your cheeks is the same as the inner lining of the vaginal canal. I know this because my friend has a small scar indenting the interior of her left cheek, where doctors extracted this tissue for her vaginal reconstruction. This information sat uncomfortably lodged within the forefront of my brain. I wasn't sure what to do with this knowledge, other than stare at it uncomfortably, waiting for its importance to reveal itself to me.   

I began to understand consent around the same time I understood why this fact seems to bother me to the extent it did. Food and Sex and substances were intimacies I allowed to penetrate these tissues without my consent. I could not quite trace the origin of this consent, or if it was a choice I could really decide at all. All I could manage to pinpoint consent was the act of unhinging of my jaw, akin to the slow spreading of my legs. Where these tissues were exposed to the light, welcoming a foreign object to its soft origin. 

My first kiss took place when I was fifteen, in my sophomore year of highschool. That same day, also happened to be when I smoked weed for the first time. 

My friend’s 22 year old brother pulled into my driveway with his cherry red honda, rims muddied from the dirt road he drove across to get here. I pulled my pink mini skirt down while walking down the decline of my driveway so as to not seem too suggestive. I awkwardly stepped into the passenger seat, into the strenuous angle it had been altered to. We exchanged hellos without eye contact. His eyes were an untrustworthy blue in contrast to his dark curls piling on top of his forehead. We drove to the movie theater where he promised to show me the new movie we had discussed over text. 

He parked in the back of the empty parking lot. I remember suggesting closer spots out of the concern that it might rain, and we would have to walk back further. 

“I like how secluded it is,” he responded.” “We should smoke before the movie…it will make it more fun, " he suggested. 

From the glove department, he offered me the blue metal tube. 

“You can have the first hit”

I inhaled a breath from the pen, under the compelling disguise that I have done this act before. The consequent cough blew my cover. I could not catch breath into my lungs for minutes of self suffocation. He offered me water to which I took delicate sips so as to not appear greedy. 

“I don't think I am going to smoke actually, " he noted. “I just remembered I have soccer practice later”.  

My vision sank behind my eyes, as my periphery consumed my vision in a darkened haze. My breath was slow and audible as my mouth hung open. His body leaned over the center console and unbuckled the seat belt I had not realized was still harnessed around my body. His figure hung over me, lingering, as he analyzed the situation. I could feel his eyes skimming up my thighs, and I remember regretting wearing that pink mini skirt. 

“Can I kiss you?” He asked

Though he did not allow time for a response. It was less of a question and more of a preformative gesture. His face met mine with stiff lips. He began to dart his hot tongue inside of my mouth. He gripped my face with the moist sweat of his palms to move my face into his. My eyes remained open, as I analyzed the fibers of his eyebrow whose hairs were centimeters away from my vision.I began to float elsewhere. My vision left my eyes and began hovering above the two of us as if I was granted access to a birds eye view. I could feel every sensation, but not understand that it was me who was feeling them. Every nerve impulse was signaled but never met its destination within my frontal cortex, my brain did not, could not accept that this was a real experience. The saliva from his mouth dripped from the corners of my lips while I waited until he was finished. He pulled away to gauge my response. The white of my eyes engulfed the soft brown of my pupils in shock. His right hand pushed our faces together once more while his left hand drifted up my skirt. 

We never made it inside the movie theater. 

I remember telling all of my friends about how I had my first kiss. How it was with an older boy but I never specified the exact age gap of seven years. I am writing this turning 20, and my younger sister is now 15. I cannot so easily forgive this fact when I have the perspective to understand that I was not “mature for my age” but rather a child naive enough to believe that this was true.  

From that point forward, my lips remained parallelly shut in a horizontal line. Teeth clenched in an effort to protect the softness that remained. They did open however, to the inhalation of smoke, and to the sips of alcohol that would calm such feelings of horror. This was a ruin I could consent to. And I felt in control. It was something that would affirm the emotional state I was already in. This time my lips welcomed such a violation. The sweet sting of menthol nicotine on the back of my throat was a pain my mouth embraced. 

My jaw remained shut to the plates of dinner that steamed before me. There was a lingering betrayal and ugliness I let enter my body with that kiss. I thought I could starve it out in this way. Something I could not let in so long as I kept my jaw shut as I should have done that day.

There is an intimacy in these tissues. Creating an internal canal of both pleasure and pain. What is consent if to not preserve these sacred spaces. Or at least have a say of what can enter. I struggle with the definitive line between control and intimacy. If these two ideas can exist as one. If surender is a necessary factor in closeness. I'm not sure I am willing to relinquish control for the sake of feeling close. I am already close enough to everything within me. The claustrophobic space where my tongue curls into my mouth. Or when I swallow food down my esophagus sacrificing air for fuel. It all seems like sacrifice. I'd rather keep my jaw shut. It is safer this way.   

My eyelids flower open to the softly light dentistry office. An angelic filter of anesthetic stretches a numb smile across my face. The sterile fragrance of formaldehyde with slight undertones of clove oil penetrates my nasal cavity. I am transported to the car to my living room couch seamlessly. The leather cushion adheres to the sweat of my summer skin, as I melt into the foreign womb of the couch, returning to my prenatal space. Before there was pain. Before there was awareness. Before I knew something was missing.

I woke up for a second time to the end credits of Survivor ringing in my ears. I drifted off to the bathroom sink, not quite awake yet. Bending over the porcelain sink, I spat out a concerning amount of blood. I could feel a cloudy obstruction lodged in the back of my molars. Reaching my fingers to the back of my throat, I extracted a clown's handkerchief length of gause drenched in fresh blood. The pain still feels dull and untraceable, likely due to the anesthetic. This makes the aching sensation more aggravating due to its ambiguity. 

The vibration from my phone draws my attention elsewhere. I see Sam’s contact name spelled out in lower case letters running across my screen like lines of news on the periphery of the television screen. Sam was my first love. A boyfriend who’s puppy kisses and simple kindness filled the impenetrable emptiness that had been lingering for years since the incident. He was, however, not compatible with my identity in any way. I had realized this after a year into our relationship. It was a fact I could circle back to. An absolute. I could not see myself being with him in a couple months, let alone years. He had been cradled as the youngest child, unaware of the adversity the average human being endured. His kindness was bred from naivety, while mine was through empathy. No amount of words that could slip from my lips could breach this chasm between us. 

But he was warm. And a comfort for my body when I felt empty and alone. So I told him to come over. 

While waiting for him to come, I wandered through the kitchen towards the medicine cabinet. Anything that could take this pain away. The sweet outer shell of the orange Advil pellet slid down my throat with the bloodied saliva I compiled to lubricate my esophagus. The orange bottle of oxycontin from my father’s collarbone surgery met my eye. I skimmed over the dosage and took two, as I did with most medications. It left a chalky aftertaste in my mouth that lingered on the tip of my tongue. I washed the residue down with almond milk, straight from the carton. This was my guilty pleasure I partook in when I knew no one was home. After a while I stopped feeling guilty, and just lived on as it was normal to begin with. I went back to not brushing my teeth after a month of dating. It is easy to justify habits when they can be repeated without consequences I suppose. Sam felt like this too. Something I took to wash a bad taste from my mouth.

Sam closes the front door behind himself softly, placing weight between his hands and the door to muffle the clinking sound of locks. “No one is home” I grumble from the kitchen. He proceeds toward me with louder steps. I am engulfed in his embrace, met by the faint trace of his pine scented cologne. He asks me how I am feeling, and all I can manage to say is “not good” . I guided him to my bedroom where we lay in my bed intertwined. His limbs brained between mine as I lay my head against his boney chest. 

I try to sleep but my jaw throbs with an intolerable pain radiating up throughout my skull. I cannot sit with this pain, so I place the feelings elsewhere. I begin to rock my pelvis slowly against Sam, kissing his neck softly. Sex is something that I have no problem initiating. The desire to feel wanted and filled is something I would cross oceans to achieve. But with men it seems to require minimal effort. A cheap substitute for something I know cannot be so easily replaced. 

We go through the motions of what the other needs to be properly warmed up for the act. I stopped enjoying sex with Sam within the first month of our relationship. It was something I closed my eyes and endured, for the sake of normalcy. But it was something he enjoyed doing, and I felt whole in this distorted act of connection. 

My heart rate flutters with each kiss down my neck. Blood pumps straight through my head, and throbs at my jaw. It is a generalized pain I cannot quite place. The sensation of thumbs pressing down on my molars as if the pressure could puncture through my gums. 

“I love you” Sam whispers between breaths. 

I lie there paralyzed. I realize he is inside of me, but I wasn't sure when that transition had been made. The steady ache of my jaw pain was the only sensation my body could recognize, the rest silenced by medication. I could feel a thrusting pressure inside of me. Of a similar pain that possessed my mouth. My face became hot and in an effort to calm down I ran my tongue across the tiles of my teeth like a xylophone. Imagining myself playing a soft lullaby to convince my body that this too will pass.  

I began to cry. Which turned into subtle sobs. Sam did not recognize this as an act of pain but rather a moan of pleasure as he continued for minutes until his face met mine. It was a cry of exhaust. How a toddler dries after a long day at school. It never felt like one thing, just everything all at once. A general, chronic torture. 

I felt like I was fifteen again. In that cherry red Honda, sitting crossed legged in the passenger seat. When my sensions became blurred and I let myself be used. I knew that this was different. That Sam was different and that he loved me, to the extent that he could. But something lingered beneath these beliefs I held. That Sam was no different, and that I would accept the pain all over again. For the sake of pleasing others, and of showing them what they wanted to see. 

Sam stared at me in utter shock. Confused by the situation he had failed to read, and I had failed to communicate. 

“I need you to leave” I expressed with my head buried in the pillow away from his face. His figure hovered over mine, lingering like that man once did. He slammed the door behind him. 

I took more pills then drifted off to sleep. I could not bear to be conscious any longer. 

I spent the following eight days drifting between states of consciousness. A walk to the kitchen, down to the medicine cabinet. Open the refrigerator to get an ice pack for my cheeks. Back to the bedroom and fall asleep. Repeat. 

My orthodontist told me that I had a dry socket in all four of my wisdom tooth extraction sites. Google defines dry socket as, “when a blood clot at the site where the tooth was removed does not form, comes out or dissolves before the wound has healed.” I have always had this premonition that my body rejects the notion of healing. It only knew suppression and intoxication to fill the void. It did not possess the ability to clot, and form its natural bandaid over its abused origin. The only way I know I am alive is when I am feeling pain. Because to be alive is to feel. And most days I could not manage to feel anything. 

I stopped eating out of fear of infection. The thought of food gathering in the hollow sockets of my gums kept me up at night. I wanted this pain to go away, so I prescribed myself more pills and sleep. Time took away this pain eventually. Or at least shoved it deep enough that my smile was capable of convincing the mirror. 

Sam and I are no longer together. I still forget to brush my teeth, but always whiten them on Sundays. I swish toothpaste around my mouth before dates, and drench myself in perfume when I forget to shower. I still see his untrustworthy eyes in every cherry colored car that catches my eye. I struggle to eat breakfast and lunch on days I know I will see people. I fear they can smell my breath between interactions. The secrets that slip through my teeth.   

My tongue bends backward toward the periphery of my tonsils. It traces the hollows of my gums, where my wisdom teeth once protruded. Scarred sockets of healed over tissue reflect back sensation onto my tongue. Something is missing. Something extracted without my consent. Something that was once mine. There comes a trade between wisdom and pain. It is why lobotomies were invented. And why we drink away our brain cells. It is all too much to know. To feel what we cannot forget. And while the wisdom of these teeth rip through my gums declaring their presence, there is nothing one can do to ignore it. So we extract what we can, and tolerate the emptiness. 

I wrote the entirety of this piece stoned. I complete most of my writing under the influence if I am being honest. People describe their creative processes as a way to concentrate and lock in to what they are trying to communicate. I find that I must zoom out to grasp these distant details. I am telling a story about another girl, whom I do not recognize as me, but I can tell you everything she felt. A part of me feels that when I identify myself to be this girl, the experiences become mine too, and everything is real. Writing has always seemed to give me that third space. One of the prenatal womb, cavity of my mouth, anything warm and dark. Void of realism. My lips do not open when I write. Most readers skim from left to right in their head. The words never materialize, and the secret of silence is preserved. I find there to be nothing more intimate than this soundless exchange of words.