You need to open up new places inside of you to store the teeth from your dreams. That same nightmare ever since you found out, reaching inside your mouth to pull out a glistening bicuspid, still linked to you by a frothy strand. One by one, the rest implode hollow, fall into your palm, leaving you with a crooked bumpkin grin. You stare down at your fistful of gleaming human ivory until the alarm finally pulls you above. There is no one in bed to block your arm’s arc to the nightstand. Mattress undented, the covers smell like you alone. You grab a double handful of your own belly and dive back underneath.
Nothing inside your body is your own anymore. Your whole life, people have been barging inside, fingers and tongues and scraps of DNA, but they have always taken these things out when they left before. It is time to reclaim your spaces.
Reach inside, for starters, and pull out all those writhing old memories you won’t need anymore. Four months ago when his hands were finally locked in your fragrant sweaty hair, as he pulled your head to butt his, whispering, can we turn the lights off? All the yes of your neurons, muscles carbonated with shudders—pop those bubbles and, in every tiny dark cavity, plug a phantom tooth for safekeeping.
Three Saturdays ago when you teetered downtown, the scent of eucalyptus drawing bile up your throat, and ducked into a drugstore to pick out that glossy box with its pinks and blues and plus signs. Locked eyes with the pimpled cashier and waited—one, two, three heartbeats, save the space between them—finally asked him, “Do you have a restroom?” Ten minutes later, marched back out, shoulders sucked forward into your chest, judas test wrapped in toilet paper on the bottom of your purse. Did you remember to wash your hands? Acrid wet smudges on the thighs of your jeans. No eye contact for anyone anymore.
You are starved for sleep all the time now, but every time your lids flutter closed, the floors of your dreams are treacherous with broken teeth. You looked it up after the first week, the meaning of the dream. It indicates a loss of security, a loss of attractiveness, a loss of power. In the dream, you’re more concerned about the loss of teeth. And when you wake up, they are left inside of you. Nobody likes to say anything, but you rattle with them when you roll over in bed. There is never room enough.
And then this afternoon, begging him to meet you at the bar you always went to together. He’d already brought his new girlfriend here, you could tell by the way he scanned the whole room, twice, before taking the stool next to you. You listen with your stomach these few weeks, not with your ears; you needed to make space for his reaction. Locked yourself in that phone booth of a girls’ room and loosed foamy ribbons from your mouth into the greyed porcelain, orange and basil and a chalky film of morning vitamins. When you returned, he’d ordered a round to fill you.
“Man, that sucks,” he’d said afterwards, and even his words are always wrong, too sharp for your world, need to be baby-proofed. He nudged the beer toward you. “Might as well drink it. Doesn’t matter anyway, huh?”
You were right not to take the drink he offers. Protect your spaces.
“Yeah, you were going to be father of the year,” you said, the words coming out tarnished-brassy. The gap in the conversation where you waited for him to laugh, guard that space too. Take that emptiness and cram it with teeth. Why do they keep falling out of you?
Outside the bar, before you crumpled into the driver’s seat, you took out your cell phone and hit the redial button. Through the robots and finally to the receptionist, who asked, “Are you calling to confirm tomorrow’s appointment?” Throw that sentence away—purge it—and remember that you waited just a moment too long before you said “Yes.” Tomorrow, when the anesthesia’s wearing off, you can hold tight to being the person who paused before saying yes. It won’t undo anything, but there will be some solace in it.
And now tonight. Savor the breath of silence before endless ringing clicks into his voicemail, all seven times. After you palm the last three rattling Ambien from that old prescription, trying for one night of toothless dreams before tomorrow’s procedure, do not throw away the bottle. Save it for future storage. Hock your snot into tissues, shed your make-up in great lurid smudges on the pillowcase. Purge yourself of everything you can.
His soft blunt nose, his thundercloud eyes, the fluttering of veins behind his ear—these are the things you cannot discard. Ball them up with teeth and teeth and make a knobby little shark, feel it swim around your belly. Let it knock the walls of its makeshift aquarium, let it feed and rage and drink all your tributaries. It will not swim there very much longer, and soon you will have another empty place to fill.