I lost a tooth today, too rotten and brittle to be saved. Cheerfully chiseled out of my jaw by a woman of mixed Hispanic and Asian heritage, easily young enough to be my daughter.
When we are young, we lose our first set of teeth. We are proud when this happens, for it is part of a coming adulthood. It is not so deranging as the storm of puberty. When we begin to lose our second set, it is also the signal of a coming transition. It may be a joyous one to others but I do not regard it so.
The bleeding, blinding headache, swelling and raw throbbing in my jaw are tolerable because they demonstrate that I'm not dead yet and may live to endure the loss of many more of my bodily constituents before they finally flame into cinders, what mindlessly little of me will be left.
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