Your heart lives in your jaw.
You know because you can feel it beating. There’s a needle drilling down somewhere above it, through the rot and the discoloured enamel. It’s getting dangerously close to the softness. No pain, just an impossible numb weight. And a screaming.
Your heart lives in your jaw and your jaw is locked out. Your mouth is flooding. When you spit, there’s so much blood.
I broke a front tooth when I was less than two years old, falling off a windowsill I was climbing and onto my face. It was a milk tooth but it didn’t grow for the longest time and I had a massive gap for years, way before any of my peers began losing their milk teeth. It was the cause of some worry for everyone besides me, apparently. I don’t remember much of it all, it was recounted to me enough by my grandmother, who told the story like it was one of a cursed child’s, cursed until a permanent tooth emerged, coaxed out by prayers and the goodness of the heart in my jaw.
When it grew back, it grew with a vengeance. Bigger than the rest, leaving barely any space for the one next to it, which turned and twisted and just about managed to squeeze between it and my canine. I spent a few years afraid I’d be taken to a dentist and that the dentist would suggest I get braces (this was a very real fear, I had a massive overbite) but it never happened and it was left alone. The result was some of the most misshapen bite marks ever left, a signature, something to be remembered by.
Smashing your face and losing a tooth in infancy must do something to a child. I truly believe I would be a different person if I had not been trying to scale the window that day.
I used to watch the way people’s teeth clicked when they spoke. When I grew up were mine going to sit stacked perfectly upper-teeth-over-bottom, molar-over-molar, or snap across, jaw sliding left to right, or canine-over-bottom-tooth, a puzzle? Would I finally be caught in my crookedness and strapped with braces? Would they be tinted yellow or would my father’s spotless smile make its way onto my face?
It was a real preoccupation, not of beauty but of identity.
The dentist’s office tastes clean. Squeaky. An ominous place. If you put your incisors together in the waiting room it sounds like nails on a chalkboard. How many toothaches can you fit in a room. Advertisements for teeth whitening and teeth brightening and clear braces and retainers. All with photos of the most smiley people you have ever seen. If you’re unlucky there’ll be before and after pictures too. The after pictures are always smiling, like having a strangers rubber-glove fingers in your mouth for hours sparked joy. If the ones in the before pictures smiled, there would be fewer people in that waiting room.
It was the last molar on the bottom right that took me to one last year. It was rotting deep down, the pain not in my mouth anymore but in my ear. A local anaesthetic, jaw heavy, bloody open-mouthed haunted girl horror trope. About to bite someone’s head off, but hardly. Pieces of soft tissue and blood swirling around. Self-cannibalising. The taste of coins, but none of the pain associated with it.
I wanted it to be over, I needed it to be over, I paid so much money for it to be over but there were weeks to go. The temporary cast that was put in place of my mutilated tooth was also drilled into. This time, it was water and cement, something being built inside of me, for me. I spat out construction materials.
Then there was bubblegum pink mould. Filled with an equally bubblegummy blue paste. This was on the evening of the full moon and my jaw was about to unhinge. Fall to the sanitised floor, along with the mould that was sitting pretty over my teeth, and shatter. But it didn’t and we had a blue full-mouthed bite. I only had to wait now. And pop a few painkillers in the meantime.
This was not going to be about the dentistry industry or the monetisation of physical beauty or the way that teeth do and have always fit into that, but I may be getting a little close to it. I do believe teeth-care is healthcare; cavities filled and rot extracted and teeth taken out, teeth replaced. But the memory of a needle getting in the space between teeth and gums, being “cleaned,” comes to me, and I just have to say some of these things, okay. (Tooth scaling, it’s called, like I’m a fish being prepared for consumption, and it’s meant to take off tartar and other icky things and also takes off all the enamel and leaves your teeth tingling for days.)
The epidemic of people getting their sweet uneven teeth shaved down and replaced with veneers comes to mind, and I just have to say some of these things, okay.
Some of the prettiest, most unique smiles of our time have fallen victim to veneers. So transformative they feel criminal. The dramatics of this statement are not lost on me, and I’m not blaming the ones who get these procedures, of course not. ‘Good’ teeth have always been reflections of status and wealth, just like skin or hair or beauty in general. A catalogue-smile. They all look the same.
Every time I see photos or videos of Kirk Hammett in the 80s, I can’t help but mourn a little bit. It’s a stupid sentiment; I don’t know him or his reasons for ‘fixing’ his teeth, but I have a feeling he may not have made the choice if he weren’t a public figure who had his pictures taken all the time. As would be the case for most famous people. (Jacob Elordi, don’t even think about it. The loss would be momentous.)
The entertainment industry is chock-full of people with the exact same set of teeth. Strait-jacketed teeth, brighter than the flashes. The rich and famous don’t want to stand out anymore. Pain is beauty and maintenance is also beauty and it takes a lot of money to look effortless and whatever else they say.
I wanted a taste so I asked for porcelain.
Mercury was in retrograde during the time I was getting my root canal. Did I need it? Of course. Would I have rather tied that tooth with a string and then tied the string to a doorknob and slammed the door shut in the hopes of pulling the entire tooth off? Of course not.
Now, one of the teeth in my mouth isn’t mine. I love it. Sometimes I run my tongue over it and feel its perfect porcelain scoop. I could never grow anything like it myself. It was crafted for me.