Minor Bones Malfunctioning
healing upon breaking
Half of my molar fell out last night. Well, I pulled it out actually. I was eating raw, baby carrots. It came out painlessly, bloodless. I think it’s a cracked tooth from a decades-old filling. It’s a sizable piece on its own but a very small piece of me. Same thing last year when I broke the tiniest shard of bone off of the left side of my foot. Whenever I would go into the doctor’s to get x-rayed I’d take a picture of it, fascinated to see my bone floating in the spaces inside of me. The teeniest piece of me malfunctioning, an injury that was enough to change my day-to-day for over three months.
Last weekend, a woman who used to live in my current apartment died. Young, maybe in her mid-50s. She was a tenant in my mom’s apartment building. I met her over the summer. She was our waitress once at a nearby favorite for fried clams. Before I moved into my place, she assured me the landlord’s were quiet and kept to themselves. She lived in my apartment for 12 years before they hiked up the rent.
Over the summer someone rear-ended her parked car so bad the entire bumper fell to the ground, and the car stayed out front exactly like that for a few days. In the lead up to her death, she was airlifted to Boston for a stroke, possibly a heart attack, that happened while she was driving. She was alive for a few more days but had brain damage.
I didn’t even know her, but I can’t believe she’s gone. Sometimes the people you encounter by chance, so briefly you can’t even consider them acquaintances, are the ones you remember most. They have no beginning or end. They’re the characters who eternally live on in your mind. You don’t even realize it until something final happens to them. Her niece wrote a goodbye post to her, referring to her as always somewhat of a mystery but loving and caring, no matter what was going on in her personal affairs.
As I searched for my misplaced health insurance card for my dentist appointment, I shuffled past high school-era zines, photo collages, a stack of photo albums, 28 pages of non-fiction notes from a 2007 writing project (a love story I’ve never written but really should), a pile of old journals. What hints do they hold of the “me”-ness of me? I thought of how all the things you own cease to exist when you’re gone, and it’s your family who has to rifle through your crap. Maybe this is a subconscious reason I don’t hold onto most things for very long (my father died when I was barely 15 years-old). I want to lessen the load for whomever’s task it ends up being.
Between the tooth and the foot, it feels like life is giving me tiny previews of common elderly ailments that await. The physical body starts to clean out far before one’s tangible possessions are fussed over. If I’m at the age where teeth fall out for no reason, I’m past the acceptable age of being allowed to take anything for granted.
It’s enough that I have taken a strong liking to spending time in quiet, morning hours awakening with the day. I’ve drastically evolved from the person who lived up every night as if it was her last. I make peace with all previous identities of myself and recognize the strength it took me to get as far as here. As rougher memories get pushed to the back burner, I feel free from the suffocation of selling myself as anything other than my true, actualized self. I will calmly and pleasantly ease into wearing this midlife suit of skin for now, humbled in knowing that eventually the end will unfold itself before me.