Didn't Want To Have To Do It

[Where would you be if you hadn't?]

⋆⁺₊⋆ ❂ ⋆⁺₊⋆

As I’m sitting up from my second cavity filling within the month (after seven years of avoiding the dentist altogether), a section of my tooth falls flat into my hand. It’s smaller than a gravel fragment. I immediately pinch it between two fingers as if it’s contraband, my own biology, it’s black tar heroin. My cellular is dead and the walk to the train is quiet. I read The Lover standing up, refusing to grab the rail and risk contaminating my Tooth. I come three inches from slamming horizontally onto a baby carriage as the train slams into the last station. The baby smiles, so I smile, but then she stops smiling, so I stop smiling, and I realize it’s due to my lopsided novocaine grin. I’ve horrified her. It’s no matter. I have Tooth. I fumble with the keys to my apartment, maintaining pressure on Tooth so much so my fingers are turning purple and blue. Vainly searching for a piece of card stock to contrast the whitish enamel against my journal, I rip apart a blue cigarette carton and give Tooth a forever home, a cerulean home, a smoker’s home. I didn’t want to have to do it. And had I let myself avoid the dentist ‘till I had fish bones for teeth, I would not have such a peculiar, divine artifact for the historians and detectives and great-great-granddaughters and FBI agents to find me with. I didn’t want to have to do it. 

We’d broken up three months ago, and still lived together. He’d stopped sharing his location months before even that, but his MacBook knew to find him at Pumps every three nights. For this, I loathed the MacBook. I looked not out of curiosity. I looked when I’d find our dog covered in her own feces after getting home from work. I looked when the front door was unlocked and ajar. I looked when the burner was left on, I looked when the music in the studio below us was blaring on repeat, I looked when there was vomit crusted to the toilet seat. I looked when the shower was left running and towels were missing. I took a flight out to Phoenix and called realty agents in Chicago from a red dirt desire path. I rented a 1.5 bed for a quarter of what I was paying for my rent-striking ex and myself. I flew back to the city, ate three hot dogs with two breaths between at Myrtle Pub, packed my things, and suddenly, I was Midwestern again. I didn’t want to have to do it. 

I leave work half past one in the morning. Despite the white glitter placed lovingly upon my eyelashes, I had not been kissed at midnight by the bartender with a longterm girlfriend. My truck is thirty years old with 280k miles to show it. She’s parked illegally on a slant, has no defrost feature, and groans like a putter boat lost in wharfs. My head is light from two glasses of champagne on an empty stomach. The truck sputters her engine over, she’s making all the right sounds, but she will not back up. Reluctantly, familiarly, I jump out and start hacking at the black ice mounds trapping the wheels with a machete leant to me by my local liquor store employee, Tasso. The attempt is futile. Two weeks ago, my windshield had been frosted over and even the machete couldn’t cut through the internal icing. The entire dishwashing crew came out with credit cards to slough the snow onto my dashboard. I drove home wet. This time around, I reenter the restaurant with head hanging to my ribs. The dish pit emptied out hours ago. The occupied bartender stares holes into my nipples, protruding through my parka seemingly, he begs for my pitiful request for help, to rationalize our affair, to make sense of what I loathed. Bypass. The drunkened owner, the garm crew, the bar back and the hospitality manager run out behind me. They slip and slide and slosh pocketfuls of champagne-filled coupes across the parking lot. They push, I rev, they rock, I rev again. In and out and in and out like this, seven minutes of vehicular orgy, they push and push until I’m released. There is cheering, there is clapping, there is the pounding of flat hands against my bumper. I drive past the bar window. He stands with two thumbs up, head shaking, side to side, laughing. I miss him, then. I’m angry, then. I didn’t want to have to do it. 

❂

don’t let

your loving

take too long

you may come

too late

and i’ll be gone

don’t let

fear

make you stray

don’t wait

on heartbreak

to show the way

bell hooks ‘17’ when angels speak of love 2007