My teeth are sore in the mornings. Sometimes I remember dreams; starving, thirsty, my mouth unable to open. When nervous, I clack my teeth together, try to feel every protrusion as they slide into every groove. The tops are mostly flat.
Every dentist for the last five years has tried to sell me a mouthguard to wear while sleeping. No thank you, I say, that's all from when I was a kid. Honestly, as far as I can remember, my teeth have always been like this.
Mom says when I was young she could hear me grinding my teeth in my sleep. Molar on molar. The canines have remained untouched.
Is this nerves? I am frightened by the lock-jaw dreams. I wake up stressed, ill-rested, my face like the wrong end of a punch.
I was a paranoid child. Anxiety attacks occurred weekly, if not daily. We once ran out of gas on the way to soccer practice. No more than a half-mile from the Citgo, I wept in the back seat.
In fourth grade I asked to be sent home often. In junior high I would close my eyes and clench my hands, digging my nails into the palms, trying to feel what had just gone numb. Anxiety was a floating feeling; my limbs were skinny balloons. Eventually I learned how to stop the attacks through distraction. Nights now, when I feel one coming, the lights go on, a book is opened, no matter how tired I am. Eventually I pass out, and in the morning the pages are wet with drool.
For most anxious people, the very hint of a panic attack gives them the howling fantods. They have a strange thought, of something that, after several bad incidents, they now associate with panic. Then the fear of having a panic attack takes over. At that point, they're lost, stumbling to a corner to babble and hold onto the walls. Squinting eyes, touching the counters, reminding themselves that everything around them is real.
My panic attacks most likely started when I was eight. I can't say for sure when the first was, but my guess is the night I realized I was going to die. A world lit professor sophomore year of college told me the mid-20s are the years when most people understand the finality of their own mortality. So I was a little early. No real surprise. I'd gone fishing and learned how to ride a bike before my older brother.
I usually freak out while thinking about dying. It's like one of those shots you see in epic movies, where the camera focuses on a single leaf, then an entire forest, then a whole state/country, then a continent, the earth, the galaxy, infinity. It's like my head tries to fit the image of eternity inside. Everything explodes, and the attack lasts as long as it takes to glue the pieces back together. But I end up grinding away the top layer of my teeth.
Dostoevsky says that man is a constructive animal. We build staircases of knowledge, all going up, all without a destination. The closer we get to finishing our staircase, the more often we branch to the side, or double back on ourselves. For some reason, D says, man always avoids finishing his project.
Nietzsche believes that man searches for a meaning to his life. Nietzsche also says there is no meaning. Even a fly believes he is the center of the universe. When we die, we are forgotten, and eventually no one cares. I think this truth is what keeps us building our staircases forever. Who wants to finish at the door to that kind of knowledge? We tell ourselves everyday that we matter, that we exist for a reason. We invent gods and morality and laws; we procreate and do everything we can to survive. The inevitable question is Why? Nobody wants to hear that the answer is No Reason.
I'm not trying to be pretentious or didactic. I don't think I know any better about life than others. I want a purpose just as much as most people. I'd like god to come down and tell me there's a reason for everything that happens. I'm not saying there is one, but I hope like hell a universal truth exists. If you want to know how uneasy I am about the whole thing, just look at my teeth.
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