Baby Teeth
I pulled the prayers from my raw gums like baby teeth. With the
blood spat into my palm, there lay the tools with which I
chewed up everything I ever put into my mouth. And yet even
then I had felt the hands working my jaw for me.
Every day I tongue the empty space before meals and again at
bedtime. There’s this moment when I feel like I should be
saying something, but the void leaves my tongue aimless in the
newfound space. I’ve grown accustomed to it.
I wasn’t so fond of it when they wiggled in my mouth when I talked
or ate, acting like a broken saloon door for my roving tongue. I
didn’t like to brag about it with my friends. It didn’t quite feel
like a rite of passage as it did a loose Band-Aid.
They dangled on those last few roots that desperately clung on to that
childlike innocence, which looked like Awana badges, Sunday
school, father reading to me bedtime stories of David, the
girlfriends in church that were always repentant after we
touched;
I began to believe I could sew it back in if I only believed hard
enough. It was in those last few efforts that I was at my lowest,
when my gums started to become infected as bacteria got
beneath the bone and festered in the flesh. I grew sorer and
sorer.
At some point I ripped every last one of them out. The therapist had
cancelled my last three appointments. The bible study couldn’t
progress since it refused to answer my first three questions. I
stopped believing an artist had to first and foremost be
miserable.
I still keep them in a little plastic treasure chest in a cardboard box in
the garage, along with my plastic baseball trophies and other
sentiments unworthy of the bedroom shelves. I recycled all the
extra bibles I previously felt guilty enough to never say no to.
Sometimes a meal looks so good I feel the need to thank someone for
it. Sometimes I wake up so happy I need to give someone credit.
Sometimes that’s not the case. I’m happy I don’t have the voices
telling me through my own teeth how sinful I am.
I’m also happy they’re not telling you how sinful you are.
I tongue the space before meals and before I drift to sleep. I feel
something growing there. My parents are looking into an
operation that will put the teeth back in. I still fear one day I’ll
be the one to grab the sewing kit.
I don’t fear cavities anymore. I think they took them all with them. I
brush my teeth now and believe in modern medicine, and
climate change. Needless to say, I didn’t put them under my
pillow that night.
