Once in a moment of definite irrationality and maybe even mild terror, I scrawled in jagged and angry letters that I wished to pull all my teeth out. Only a month later, I look back at that girl with a vague sense of confusion, as if a cloud had settled between me and her, and now her thoughts are all hazy to me.

I do recall, however, that this toothless fantasy was not some perverse dream of mine, nor was it some unique method of counterculture in a defiant college-indie-girl way. In fact, looking back, it’s almost unnerving how childlike this desire was; like a petulant kid throwing away a toy it wanted gone, the removal of teeth suggested the exodus of the unclean and distasteful aspects of myself.

The most plausible explanation for why it was specifically my teeth that had to go, is that the life cycle of the teeth seemed inherently poetic, and I was romanced by the idea of a tangible manifestation of what I was going through at the time. The same was true of me in 2nd grade; I recall myself twisting my teeth and rocking them until they hung on by just a thread of my gums, and then with joy, I’d watch them fall out. There was pride in my gapped smile, and satisfaction in the physical proof of my growing-up. Pulling out my adult teeth was a slightly corrupt version of the same concept, and I reveled in the macabre of it all.  

Lately, I find myself being drawn to these former daydreams—not with any particular feelings of empathy, but some liminal feeling wavering between pity and nostalgia. I watch these imaginings with the same fascination and revulsion as those videos of people getting their pimples popped, revering in their discomfort which so clearly morphs into relief. I see myself clinging to cold metal pliers, yanking each tooth with relentless focus, running my tongue over the craters left behind.      

In retrospect, it seems as though I was struggling with the object permanence of it all; the unpleasant truth that I have passed this developmental marker, and I can’t shove my thoughts where I can’t see or hear them and thus pretend they don’t exist. Did I think that yanking my teeth out would allow for a second set of adult teeth to come in? Perhaps—this thought is not so irrational. I was begging for a return to a clean slate, an opportunity I had squandered at the ripe age of eight. I wanted to go back to the period in my life without this so-called “thought” permanence, where something could happen, and my brain would instantly dismiss it instead of latching on. My toothless daydreams were nothing but a means, or maybe an excuse, to whisper sweet nothings to myself. Rocking myself back and forth, I could take solace in the idea that the things I was so worried about didn’t exist at all. I was settling in the dull pain of “certitudes” that were really nothing but the most mendacious propaganda. 

It’s not so easy to see where things start. I don’t know when my mind began to fixate on my most human moments and use them as daggers in a relentless crusade against myself. I don’t know when I began to think that avoiding topics meant that I could pretend they weren’t there, that if I could pretend, I didn’t see them, I could lie and say they never existed. I think of all the guys I never told I liked, the fights I never picked with my friends. All the things in life that I address with circumlocution, as if tiptoeing around the subject will stop its inevitable eruption. 

It’s also not so easy to see where things end. I confess I have no idea when the girl-who-wanted-to-pull-her-teeth-out became this separate persona of mine, so unfamiliar to me that I have begun to refer to her in third person. I wish I had an answer, maybe if only to hold it to myself like an amulet in times of distress. Even so, it’s nice to feel the distance between us.