teeth cleaning
It’s summer and hot and smokey from the wildfires in Canada and I’ve just gone to the dentist. I can’t remember the last time I went, but my teeth are healthy and strong, and she only really pokes my gums in a serious way with that little metal hook four or five times.
A boy I used to date lives in a navy-blue house across the street and one door down from the dentist. I see the house when I walk up to the driveway. I see it when I put down my bag and sit in the chair and I see it when I deliberately walk past it on my way out of the appointment.
The garden outside swirls around the stairs, there are paper lanterns hanging from the front porch, and there’s a wooden chair swing, with patterned pillows where we would eat scrambled eggs after sleeping. I know I’ve done something sinful, something indulgent, walking on this sidewalk where I have innumerable times over, where muscle memory turns to the steps. I walk past instead.
The dentist peers at me with those funky goggle things they all wear and a bright blue mask and adjusts the overhead surgical light so that it temporarily blinds me. She starts scraping with the pokey hooked thing, in between teeth, front of teeth, back of teeth, in between again. She compliments my tan, comments on the wildfire smoke, and scrapes while waiting for my muffled response to how I found freshman year. This whole time, spare occasional moments where the poking forces me back to the present, I am elsewhere.
I am in the house. The left most corner of which I can see if I lean to the far side of the chair. I am in the house and there is a teal and yellow and pink carpet and aqua couches and white walls. I am in the house and there is a desk and a chair he made in eighth period woodshop. I am in the house and he swats away bumble bees as we sway on the red hammock on the side porch and there is honey lavender tea in the kitchen drawer closest to the fridge and the sheets on his bed are silky and the ceiling fan hums and the cats trace lazy circles into the rug.
I’ve been away for the summer. Or at least the part that spring bleeds into. I was in jazz bars and airports and nightclubs with sweaty bodies equally far from home. I read three books and learned songs in languages I don’t speak and somehow avoided getting sunburnt. I was surrounded by dunes and strangers and new ways of being. When you’re away, home becomes defined by nostalgia. You begin to mistakenly believe that it is not a living breathing entity that continues to beat on, changing and altering and moving away from you.
The dentist twists the tiny pokey metal hook thing into a divot to see if it’s staining or a deeper issue. It’s just staining. Fluoride and a blue cup to swish with. I leave. I walk back past the house. I don’t text him. I wait to be picked up by my uncle in front of the library.
This is the thing with the small town; no matter how long you leave, the miles you place, the “so over it”s you feel, it remains stagnant. The movie theatre that almost shut down and the winding cold of the green river, the farmers market and junk truck with the eyeless dolls in the dashboard, the convivence store and the yoga studio and the dispensaries. All of it remains cyclical, reinforcing itself and its co-op grocery stores and school boards. When you return it’s almost, but not quite, like you never left, the summers are heavy and humid and carry jazz music from the local bands and tension from what was and thunderstorms from the Atlantic. When you return, as you inevitably must, it is exactly as it always has been, beautiful and torturous and boring and more than willing and able to humble you with a biannual teeth cleaning
