No school this weekend. Small hiatus from almost everything.

I have four fewer teeth now than I did last weekend. This happened on purpose.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve put off letting go of the wisdom teeth for this long because I had somehow subconsciously started to believe that having wisdom teeth makes a person more wise and I –

I really had to sit down and have a chat with myself about that one.

They’ve been making my head hurt off and on since I was seventeen and, for one thing, it’s a hell of a lot harder to think when my head hurts. It’s harder to remember the important things when I’m in pain.

So I found an office that would take my parents’ insurance and I called the front desk and made an appointment and scraped all the paperwork together and sent it to all of the people who needed paperwork. It took me a long time to do all of those things, and most of them were tricky and uncomfortable. The lady on the other end of the phone was an absolute sweetheart, which somehow gave me courage.

I was conscious and awake for the entire operation, which was – also very much on purpose.

Ever since I stumbled on a random article in a magazine when I was a kid, I have had a distinctly irrational anxiety about receiving the wrong dose of anesthetic in a dentist’s office, and never waking up again.

Theoretically this happens because the anesthesiologist, just another imperfect human, is distracted and very tired, tired enough to make a fatal mistake with the arithmetic, tired enough to just completely read the charts wrong. Perhaps the botched arithmaric that leads to my death is the indirect result of a bad hangover and a broken heart.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about dying. They say beggers can’t be choosers, but I don’t want my last moments to take place in a dentist’s office. I have never in my life been in a dentist’s office that didn’t feel profoundly sterile and impersonal and a bit creepy and for some reason there is always a county music station playing in the background. Every single time.

So I didn’t go under during the operation, and the experience was incredibly strange.

Once they’d gotten past the bit with the needles, I just – went somewhere else. Mentally. Away from the sticking and poking and yanking sensations. Away from the country music lyrics. I escaped. I went to the place where Westley goes, in the Princess Bride, while he’s being torchured by the man with six fingers. I went to my own equivalent of Sherlock’s mind palace. I got the fuck out.

I dissociate on a fairly regular basis, but it doesn’t usually happen on purpose. This time it did.

When I settled back into the shape of a human, in a chair, in a room, in an office, in a town, in a deeply fucked up country, in a universe that’s beautiful and terrible and strange… I asked if they would let me keep my teeth. I don’t know why. I didn’t want anyone else to have them. The words came out jumbled because I couldn’t feel my face, but they heard me and understood.

My dad drove me home and picked up meds from the pharmacy. My mother made me garlic mashed potatoes with butter and cream. Incidently, mashed potatoes made from blue potatoes are actually a neat, pretty shade of purple. This is new information for me.

My head hurts and my jaw is puffy. I have been binging BBC television and sipping mug after mug of tea, and snacking on mashed potatoes.

I needed this time.

I hope it’s an excellent weekend.

P.S.

I have a small and slightly bloody envelope with four teeth inside, and I have no idea what to do with this. Help.