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One of the most common dreams is of one’s teeth falling out.
Pop Psychology and many such similar spheres have attributed these to be associated with feelings of powerlessness and a lack of control.
Is this true?
Probably not.
What is true though, is that this popular subject of dream was for me a reality.
Let’s backtrack a bit.
It wasn’t even the whole tooth that fell out, but just a small portion of the one on the left in the front.
A chip on one of the old chewing squares.
Didn’t feel very nice then and still adds an element of personal melancholy to contemplate.
I can’t put a finger on why, but the accident has from that day forward been carried as a stone in my heart, awaiting the welcome repose of release. Being thus compelled to considered why this may be, I have currently settled on a conclusion: there was something special about that swimming pool in New York.
It was an issue of grossly oppressive energy, one that could only just about be believed by a non-descript visitor.
It makes sense that this domain was one I avoided as adamantly as I could.
Not to say I was the only one who felt this way. It just so happened that this was the activity for which my classmates crafted more suspicious illness-claiming parchments than for any other.
There was also the designated swim instructor. It was known far and wide that he had, due to the ill-fortune of his personally spurred negative karma, been allocated to keep to the kids at this particularly difficult place.
Poor man; he didn’t deserve it.
Now let’s draw our attention to an episode preluding which I deliberately chose to bypass the coughing, moaning (and sometimes) crying fit of the night before. Don’t get me wrong, I hadn’t had any sort of change of heart in terms of my hatred towards the place. No, the issue was that the double P.E. of the next day had slyly slipped my mind. By the time in the morning when I stood staring at the red-highlighted bit of my schedule, my parents were already well on their way to work.
So the next day, not unlike Moses trudging through the Red Sea, I had parted my way through the flock of flakers, gripping only my strangely coarse swimsuit, slimily coated flip-flops and overly-fitted swim cap.
Next thing I knew, I stood under the shower head, placated by the utmost degree of aversion towards the sweat and blood of this monstrous architecture.
The pool was onto me: at first the silver snake just sputtered, sensing my distress. The water subsequently pushed out with such revengeful force that I would not have dared to release in combat against my worst enemy.
I imagined myself to be covered in the goo that one is crafted within before full dispatchment from the Interplanetary Graphical Matrix System.
What I had thought to be perilous dripping down from above met me many times over contained beneath.
Even the way the muck shimmered in the afternoon light was horribly frightening.
I dove in.
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It took a moment for the newness of my swim to wear off.
I was overtaken by ritualistic movement composed of kicking and pulling and breathing and repeating.
In my sharp concentration, I of course failed to note the wall that was closing in on my exhausted character.
That was the singular yet conclusively fatal error that brought my partial toothlessness into being.
It seems, based on the way that I have written this, that the realisation of the damage was immediate.
Really, this was far from the case.
It took the time that it took for me to clamber out the chlorinated pot plus the time it took me to sit straight onto one of the damp plastic chairs plus the time it took for me to draw my breath to internalise that I had changed.
A part of me had been taken up by the place I hated most.
A section of the entirety, lost forever to be a forgotten file in the library of expanse of my memory.
🦷⬇️❓
After class, I tread home in a semi-dreamlike state.
Little did I know that this had also been my teacher’s final necessary doing of the day.
Either that or he had just dropped the rest.
As I neared the electrically frightening, two-wards moving road, I thought I eyed something be-dazzlingly provocative.
Could it be?
Clutched in the palms of my instructor, a pellet of wonder.
The only comparison I knew to draw was to the earrings and pendants arranged like extra snowflakes in the display window of Tiffany’s around Christmas.
It was unmistakably similar: I recognized the gleam that ricocheted off the rock to be a replica of the one that shattered off the pupils of hungry buyers, eager to please romantic counterparts during the holiday season.
Still in the bubble of fantasy cast by the pumping anxiety-ridden adrenaline coursing through my lethargic presence, I ended up following him around the bend.
It was then that I fell down into the ditched sewer, smack-bang centre into the Kingdom of the Vermin.
Initially, I assumed that the remainder of my tooth and every other part of me would be eaten up, but before I could react, I was covered in cold hard cash.
The rats boogied, listening to ‘Fifty Dollar Bills’ and the likes.
They started up a club on my face and stomach.
It was not long before the roaches flooded in as well.
Their leaders stood watching or sitting and smoking, gathered around on the wooden desks that had also been erected at the same time as the rest of the club.
I saw shops that had been shut down for the night, fitted with largely holed blinders that blocked potential purchaser and buglers alike.
I saw these same shop keepers, scampering towards a sketchy black limo with other female figures of their kind.
After that I partook, relaxing and allowing myself to be enveloped by barely visible disgusting limbs.
Then, the sun went down.
Was having been given the ability to exist as the surface of these activities creating the illusion of power and control towards which I had always unknowingly strived?
NO. THAT’S NOT HOW THE STORY WENT!
What really happen on my quest for the jewel was this:
I had indeed tripped on the side of the road and resultantly stained my clothes. Instead of being covered by creatures as I just falsely told above, I rose to notice a pop-up florist that had seemingly been erected for my benefit alone.
I had an idea.
Currently approaching my instructor, I tread with a bouquet between my clenched palms. They were yellow ones, meant to be a humble thanks for his efforts in teaching and tooth-chipping clutz such as myself.
Gratefulness was far from my only motivation.
More than anything, I wanted to know more about the jewel.
So absorbed in myself was I, that the target had managed to make his way to elsewhere.
He had gone, that was for sure, but where?
He had gone to Coney Island and back to ride the Ferris wheel till they kicked him off.
So passionate were his cursed accusations aimed at the well-meaning security guard that they said that he had nearly been trapped on the damn thing.
Upon his return, we reconvened.
“You see, this diamond is not just one with intrinsic value. The stone’s most crucial property is the protection of the Swim Teachers from the sadness and terror that reign at that there pool. It’s the only way we can effectively be paid for doing what we do without going buckwild,” he explained.
The light in his eyes sputtered out, then rounded once more to its previous starting point in the filament of his lamp of processing. Illumination seeped through the rest of his character, pulsating energy-ridden rays of impact both into its thoughts and into his heart, till he absorbed it all and became the diamond.
“ ‘Diamonds are forever like my infinite thought’, ” remembered my mind.
“All I wanted was to be part of a climate activist group,” he hollowly justified, “I feel like a failure cause I never wanted to be a stupid swim instructor. Or I honestly didn’t really know what I wanted, that’s why I took this damn job in the first place. The head of the Swim Instructor Group dumped this as well as a little explicatory note in my office upon his resignation. I read the note and knew the words to be true: the mightily powerful protective energies of the stone shield us from the evils of the pool. But holding onto it’s taxing, oh so taxing. There are always so many accidents that occur for the sake of that cursed anxiety ridden air and I bet that’s why also why you rammed head first into a wall just a few hours ago. I hate it. I want to quit. I want to reverse the evil happenings to which I have knowingly been an accomplice,” he recited in a barely distinguishably Easter European accent.
It is worth mentioning that we were now by the river, in one of those little safe houses meant for sitting. It wasn’t raining, but even if it had been, we would have remained dry.
He fingered the diamond again. In the dreariness of the wet rain, it was just as magnificent, if not more so, than ever in the past or in the future.
“ ‘Diamonds are like having the whole world in your hand’ ,” I thought.
Behind the acrylic paint that chipped off the bench where we were sat was a maroon Cadillac, indigenously fabricated into the veiled curtain of the Interplanetary Graphical Matrix System. It was brown and yellow like deteriorating toffee.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You can still go after that if that is what you truly desire,” I said.
He leaned on the succulent shoal of the hood, sighed and reluctantly agreed.
“You are right of course. Sometimes our understanding of ourselves and of our wants ebbs and flows like this river,” he said as he motioned frontwards, “mine has just about now come to high tide,” he finished.
To be completely transparent, I was now barely on track with his rant and only wanted to find out more about the jewel. My curiosity towards it had by now balloon to take on a Golumesque obsession, but I knew that this wasn’t the right time nor the right place.
We sat in silence till the sun set.
As we rose, I noted a forgone dog floating along the stream. I thought it looked to have been killed by the laser beam of light energy originating from the treasure that was still entrenched into the cloth holding compartment.
That was that.
My instructor took the L train home.
My journey, on the other hand, wasn’t as streamlined.
I was still filled with questions, not with answers.
As I tread, I pondered many beginnings.
I thought about how some of the main focuses of the inhabitants of this world are the quests to achieve sex, money, power, or some singular personal patchy combination of these.
I thought about how unfortunate it is that there exist life-forms such as my swim instructor, who house wants that differ distinctly from its most crucial constructional elements.
Really gave me the most wonderful sense of purpose to witness.
The events of that day are no a secret but have happen to remain as such till now.
Memory is a funny thing.
So assuring and real, yet so utterly unreliable.
Saddest of all is that the more I retrieve this sequence of modulated neural firings, the less likely the whole is to fit in with the way in which the ceremonious phenomenon actually did unfold on that day and at that moment in space.
To me, this is what it means to lose a tooth.
🦷⬇️❓
WAST WRTNG 