I had forgotten the smell that you smell when a piece of your tooth starts getting grinded down into obscurity, and the gentle numb pressure as you click your hollow teeth against one another, and how the drill sings flight of the bumblebee to you if you close your eyes, and how when you open them that light overexposed everything entirely.


I haven’t had a cavity filled for nearly a decade, and that dusty gritty smell sent me back to third grade when everything was disconnected and my dentist was a cabin in the middle of the woods when compared the vast city when compared to my unassuming house on 64th street. Really it was just out in the suburbs and it had a small driveway and back then dense shrubbery constituted a forest of redwoods. My tongue is the most active part of my body and it always swirls and peeks around my mouth when i have something done to it. It swiped a tiny spy at the filling as my dentist turned away, and now i’m afraid i created some tiny pocket of insecurity and that everything will be able to infiltrate up to my brain if it can make it past my lips (which makes kissing scenes all the more dangerous). But, anyhow, i woke up at 6:30 and i’m playing the dreaded acoustic night with the same amount of cheery unpreparedness with with i approached it last time. Off i go.