Fallen Teeth

I had a dream about my teeth falling out for the first time.

My right front tooth was noticeably weaker and vanishing rapidly, becoming thin like a weakened bone, despite brushing it well before my falling asleep.

In my dream, a young couple from my arts community back home joined me. The woman resembling a mix between Susan Dey and Jane Birkin and the man resembling Nicholas Hoult. The latter had a penchant for old beepers that no longer worked and large blue row boats which he maintained, his hulls were always varnished and sleek. I remember he carried a bottle of Clorox with him to make sure the barnacles off the side of the hull were washed away in times of turbulence.

I confessed to them both about my weakening teeth, feeling extremely self-conscious about them, hiding them beneath the curtain of my lips.

We went to a seaside restaurant the gentleman knew and his girlfriend ordered Chicken Francese, but she received a disappointing aspic instead, a very dense one, and the sauce (a sort of bastardized cranberry sauce) poured onto her lap, staining her dress. I spoke up for her, as did her boyfriend, and the snooty waiter ended up taking the dish away while she began to mourn the tarnished fabric of her dress.

At one point, we walked along the banks of the river, with the young man showing me his collection of beepers whose hardware had long gone bad. I mentioned to him how surprised I was that our friendship hadn’t been altered by the course of our mutual friend back home who introduced us, a man with a deep love of Leonard Cohen’s poetry and a penchant for giving up when things get rough. They both shrugged their shoulders at me.

I mentioned how the tensile thread of our friendship had survived it, how their kindness hadn’t evaporated, despite the Leonard Cohen loving gentleman’s malicious girlfriend hating my very existence. The young man with the beeper simply answered, “well, why would it?”

At some point, I passed by an antique brass mirror and inspected my weakening front tooth. The young man with the beeper mentioned he knew a dentist who could fix my teeth right up, only I became twinged with melancholia, mourning my girlhood smile, with the crooked front tooth I’d grown to love.

A squall formed over the horizon with great, swelling cobalt clouds and it was then that I woke up.