This Happens Sometimes
During the same summer that my personality started to leak from my body as if it were a garbage bag, I broke my partner’s tooth. We had been kissing when my tooth struck her tooth. It splintered and the splinter fell, disappearing into the couch cushions amid green pennies and crumbling halves of stale dog treats. She stretched her body over the bathroom sink and studied her injury in the mirror. In her living room, I got on my hands and knees to look for the thing. A cat taunted my efforts with the flick of its elastic tail. Sitting back to stare at my empty hands, I remembered the Atlanta psychic, who, smoking a cigarette indoors, told me my life line was very short. It doesn’t mean you’ll die faster, she breathed, her throat whistling, it means you’ll get tired of life before the rest of us.
My partner joined me on the floor and we began to call the dentists.
The first receptionist picked up the phone with static in her voice.
Sorry, we can’t help you, she told us. After a moment, she revised her answer. There’s no point in calling now. We can’t help you until it’s more severe.
The receptionist at the second dentist’s office sounded puzzled. It’s too early to tell, they said, sounding aloof. Avoid anything hard for the next few weeks. They signed off.
Finally, when the man answering phones for the third office spoke, his words rattled around his mouth. We listened as he audibly scraped his lips with a crinkled sheet of wax paper, extracting something half-chewed.
Give us a call when the whole thing’s gone, he declared, slapping the receiver back into its plastic base. The words collapsed into silence.
In the rideshare, we did not hold hands; instead, she used a finger to tap each tooth in her mouth for diagnosis. She felt each ridge, every asymmetric jut. I turned away. As we reached our destination, my partner slid across the seat away from me with her pink tongue pressed against her injury. I watched as she stepped out of the car and into the bike lane, a hand clamped over her mouth. I fell out after her, closing the door as gently as I could.
We stood outside a row of storefronts, empty glass rooms with the jaws of their entrances wired shut behind security gates. At the end of the row, we found it. Bathed in the warmth of its own light, the museum stood with its mouth open. We walked inside. We passed cases filled with bits of fossilized ferns and the delicate preserved bodies of birds. At the back of the museum, a woman crouched beneath a shawl thin as moth wings opened her arms to welcome us.
The Paleoanthropologist led us down the stairs and hovered in the dark at the bottom, her entire body pressed against the only door that would let us into a world both new and very, very old. Inside her basement laboratory, fluorescent bulbs flickered like stars in the fiberglass ceiling. Overwhelming her meager, crooked silhouette on a hierarchy of metal shelves, things were caramelizing: soggy specimens, their insides pickled and bellies bloated by alcohol.
The Paleoanthropologist stood tall and flapped her hands when she told us to ignore the jars of preserved soft tissue rotting in reverse along the wall of the laboratory, which she shared with other scientists. Over a long, low table, The Paleoanthropologist cradled a cracked bone in the crook of her elbow. The place smelled of dust and wet rags. Raising her chin to look at us, she dropped her shoulders and exhaled in such a way that air hissed through her front teeth.
Excavation requires an implicit agreement, she whispered, gripping her instrument and bone. To uncover, you must be willing to destroy parts of what you seek.
I watched the Paleoanthropologist press her delicate, arthritic fingers to my partner’s face, parting her bite, loosening the hold of her irregular jaw and inviting her mandible to expand. The Paleoanthropologist dragged her dental pick along each tooth, counting. As the claw of her tool caught on the deformity of the tooth, my partner gripped the end of the lab table, audibly breathing. When the Paleoanthropologist finally opened her mouth to speak, her tongue made a sound against the roof of her mouth like it was peeling her words away in one long, misshapen strip.
How did this happen?
I was surprised to find her voice was soft, the sound of a stick of charcoal rubbed against paper. My partner swallowed, her open jaw now cradled in the curve of the woman’s leathery palm. I turned to face the wall of pickling tissue when I answered.
We were kissing, I said.
The Paleoanthropologist nodded solemnly, twisting the pick to lightly prod my partner’s tongue, testing it like a spring. With one hand, she jotted something down in her notebook, blue ink dragged into cursive letters that spelled out phrases like failed osculation and adolescent impairment. As she wrote, the pearl beads of the chain that held her glasses slapped the wooden buttons of her cardigan, making a rhythm like a heartbeat. The instrument dangled from my partner’s mouth like an after-dinner toothpick.
We were kissing, I told them both. When it happened, we were kissing.
For most of that year, we had been kissing. And we would have gone on kissing, had something not struck the tooth of my personality until it split and fell, disappearing among other debris: expired aspirations, decaying relationships. My memories, knowledge, interest. Suddenly absorbed, then forgotten; gone, I think, forever.
When did this start? the Paleoanthropologist asked, blinking.
I tried to remember when I first felt it, the hard edge of the thing that was trying to chip my personality. Maybe it was in the spring of 2017, on the thirteenth floor of Northwestern Memorial’s inpatient psychiatric facility. It was three days before I was to be released from my hospital stay with nothing but a plastic bag of my dirty underwear and a plastic ID bracelet. In my gown and sticky socks, I bent my spine over the grey keyboard of a desktop computer and began to type. When does bipolar disorder start? I whispered into the search bar. My question had largely gone unanswered. The search engine offered me more popular alternatives: is bipolar genetic, is bipolar hard to live with, is bipolar curable.
The next year, in her office, unprompted, my therapist reminded me: people fail all the time; cars, pills, jumping, none of it works. I found I had touched one finger to my tooth as it began to pound. Don’t get a gun, she added.
With joints swollen, nails jagged and brittle, the Paleoanthropologist tilted my head back and forth, peering inside me as if trying to read a Magic 8 ball.
There’s been damage, she muttered.
From her box of discarded bones, the Paleoanthropologist retrieved a single jaw. Taking my hand, she dragged my finger along its range of raised, blackened teeth. Her long, almost muscular eyelashes trembled as she pursed her lips to tell us something like a spell.
We are, all of us, in a constant state of remodeling, she whispered. Across time and for many species, in the history of the body, teeth lost to trauma or disease give way to the section of bone underneath. She pushed the tip of my finger through a gap in the row.
My mom didn’t open her mouth to smile in photographs in the eighties. Her lips clung to each other, her eyes empty. At restaurants, waiting for her to pay our check, my brother and I would sneak as many after-dinner toothpicks as we could into our pockets, fingering the plastic casings until they crinkled. In the car, I always unwrapped one and slid it between my two front teeth. I wanted to look like my mom. I wanted to create between my own teeth the gap she was born hiding. Whenever she caught me, she slapped the toothpick out of my hand. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t let me smile for her. I didn’t know then how sad it is to show other people what you are missing.
The Paleoanthropologist abandoned my mouth and shepherded us to the table with the box of discarded bones. She retrieved a single jaw, calcium tissue all chalk white and marbled yellow. With her hand, she took mine and dragged my finger along a range of raised, blackened teeth. I watched as her long, almost muscular eyelashes trembled and fluttered beneath the forced-air heat from the air duct. When she opened her eyes, it was to tell us something like a spell.
In the history of the body, across time and for many species, she revealed, teeth lost to trauma or disease give way to the section of bone underneath. We, all of us, are in a constant state of remodeling, she whispered, waving one hand over the many broken, fragmented bones nestled in her box. She pressed the tip of a finger through the gap in the jaw’s row of teeth. Resorption occurs when loss tricks the body into breaking down more than it can build. With the tooth gone, the processes needed to maintain that tooth go away; the sockets disappear into the skull, turning the toothless jaw smooth. The bone cells reduce themselves into an unrecognizable version of the original.
Of all the questions you could have asked yourself, my psychiatrist said to me that summer over the phone, ‘do I have a personality?’ is truly the last thing I would have predicted from you.
The Paleoanthropologist took my hand and pressed it to the remaining teeth in the jaw in her hand. Under pressure, one snapped and fell to the floor. She shrugged, smoothing my arm.
This happens sometimes, she assured me.
This happens sometimes. I say it, too. This happens sometimes, I tell my partner, who is still clutching the part of her I might keep hurting. This happens sometimes, I tell my friends and coworkers, who, as far as I can tell, do not have to be told not to buy a gun. This happens sometimes, I say to myself, knowing I have whole decades like this ahead of me, whether I’m “good” at having bipolar or I’m not.
The night I committed myself to the hospital, an ER psychiatrist reached across my gurney to tell me people with bipolar disorder tend to be diagnosed in their teens or early twenties. I’ve never been able to get a clear answer on when we’re expected to die. Teeth outlast everything else in the fossil record, the Paleoanthropologist said to me as she stood over her museum bones. But how can that be? With each year, each episode, my personality cracks and splinters. Parts of me slip away. Sometimes they reappear, but sometimes I don’t find them again.
My psychiatrist likes to tell me I’m not like most people with bipolar disorder. What he means by that is this: people with bipolar use professionals and medications to put all our parts back together, until we become convinced that they were never missing. We stop seeing the professionals and throw out the medications, hide out in bars and jail cells and reemerge to greet friends and family from the back of an ambulance like actors bent over the lip of the stage for one last bow.
He says this because I don’t wander through mental hospitals or state-sponsored rehabilitation centers. But I do wander in and out of whole years of my life, feeling either too empty or too full to bear it. When I take my medication, don’t drink, and feed my body with food and sleep, I still slide into episodes of depression and mania. The real parts of me chip away, resorb, disappear; they are replaced by throbbing anger, the hot breath of paranoia and a gargling kind of sadness that have hidden in my throat for decades.
When people with bipolar start to feel better, they tend to retaliate against better.
My psychiatrist cracks a window in his downtown office. Below, people who live here and people who don’t are standing on the cracked sidewalks of Michigan Avenue. They are feeling things, good and bad. About three out of every hundred people out there will be diagnosed with what I have. I look for the three; maybe, I think, I will see them with their fingers in their mouths, fumbling for the parts of them that go missing over and over. They will be tired from tracking their daily medications and offering their blood for labs, and they won’t want to go back to the eerie waiting rooms in the doctor’s offices or the ER or the counseling groups. They’ll be trying to figure out which parts of them are still theirs.
Here’s the thing: I’m scared that even if I do everything right, I will spend the rest of my life watching myself disappear. As my symptoms strike my soul, my personality must continue to shatter and reform. Parts of me I’ve learned to love fall from me just as easily as parts I hate, and anyway, they’re all part of the same thing. Besides, everyone keeps telling me, I’m one of the lucky ones. I receive the medical care and support I need to be able to do things like go to work and be loved. Not all my three will.
To get a closer look at the street below, I reach out my arm and wrap my fingers around the asphalt. I pick up the natural history museum and twist its Magic 8 ball to find a message I can understand. But my three have disappeared into a crowd of friends and partners and paleoanthropologists. I can still see their mouths, though, spilling trails of splintered selves. The ninety-seven are waving their arms, moving frantically; they want to offer us something, their own version of the tooth we used to be. But they can’t help us. Nothing will fit the gap where we once were. The fluorescent lights in my psychiatrist’s office are flickering like far-away stars and I let them.
Everyone wants to remind me of who I was before this all started, but what if I’m what started it? They’re looking up at me from the pavement to see what I’ll do or say next. I see my Paleoanthropologist in the crowd and she reaches out her hand to me, offering a bone, mine or hers, I can’t tell. My partner is there; we go back to kissing ourselves into each other.
This happens sometimes, we say, all 100 of us taking turns, each one feeling for the splinter and the crack and repair of our teeth.
This happens sometimes, I try to explain to the disappearing essay.
But when does it end? the essay asks back.
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About the Author
Eli is a current MFA student at the Bennington Writing Seminars of Bennington College in Vermont. Today, he lives in Chicago with his elderly chihuahua and her six teeth. He has spent the last decade on the city’s small stages with performance artists, comedians, and clowns, reading work that attempts to capture the innate horror of grief. Eli earned a BA in Advertising and History from the University of Georgia. In his spare time, he enjoys annoying his partner and friends by incorrectly predicting the end of most movies.