The Tooth
The pain started in one tooth on a Thursday afternoon in August. I knew exactly which one. The heat had finally broken, the air smelled like wet concrete and jasmine.
Nine years earlier1, in the months when I stopped leaving my apartment, I stopped brushing my teeth too. I stopped opening mail, stopped answering the phone, stopped washing dishes, until I was eating cereal out of a coffee mug.
Later the hygienist2 will ask when I last went to the dentist, and I'll lie.
Me and the teeth, we're both bad at telling the truth.
1 Nine years earlier: 2016. The period after trauma when basic self-care collapsed alongside everything else. Dental neglect is a reliable indicator of severe depression—visible evidence of invisible crisis, documented in enamel and decay.
2 Hygienist: Dental hygienists often see more than dentists do—the evidence of poverty, addiction, mental illness, domestic violence. They learn to ask gentle questions and accept lies. The teeth always tell a more honest story than the patient.