moreness
When my four impacted wisdom teeth were liberated from my jawbone two years ago, I wanted numbness-- I wanted Al Gore's global warming to send a glacier into my backyard so that I could rub my face against its perfect freezingness and hold ice flakes in my mouth like cereal. After three days I realized I had begun to miss not the flavor, but the crunch of one solid against another. Is that not part of the pleasure of eating? The barbaric rattle of something crushing like pre-historic bones between our teeth?
My friends brought smoothies and milkshakes, their faces blurred like the soft focus in a high school class picture. After three days I had grown to hate softness. Everything I saw became a fantasy. Tree branches outside the window were unborn firewood that would taste so good with ketchup-- like hickory and chestnuts. Crunch.
When people spoke, my thrice-a-day Vicodin melted their hair into their faces. Hairballs chatted me up about swollen cheeks and snowstorms-- but I used the bobbing up and down of their mouths to live vicariously and imagine myself with a jaw capable of tearing through steel. When they spoke, I was their teeth, and I could bite through a spoonful of Cheerios that had not yet become soggy from the milk. In my mind, I played their molars like white piano keys in an unfinished song that ended when I fell through the holes where the black ones should have been. When my visitors spoke to me I did not hear what they said-- I heard chips turn into sauce between the tooth and the tongue.
I grew tired of food that didn't protest. There is a tension in the first bite of an apple; you never know how difficult it will be to sink your teeth through all the layers. Sometimes harder food relents, and sometimes it fights back. Milkshakes on the other hand, glide over gumsand canker sores indiscriminately and fall down the esophagus like a white flag. There is no fun in eating food that surrenders so easily.