Nina woke up to a sharp, stabbing pain in
the back of her jaw spiraling all the way up to the left side of her face. It looked
as if her left wisdom tooth was telling her “good morning”. She was not in the
mood for niceties, especially from that particular incisor, considered to be
the guilty party in her book as it was responsible for her having to go to the dentist
first thing in the morning, a medical practitioner she had been avoiding
throughout her life with particular zeal and almost immaculate results. Well,
until now.
Nina’s wisdom tooth had
decided to grow out of her gum in a lopsided manner. Altogether it was reaching
for the left cheek while pushing any adjacent teeth out of the way in the
process. There she was all this time feeding the ungrateful tooth with all the
calcium and fluoride it might have needed and to repay her it had gone and
picked a fight with the rest of her mouth. The damage was so unavoidable that
had left her with no alternative; dentist-visiting, mouth-probing and
nerve-shattering tooth-grinding was on the menu and she was almost certainly
having all of the courses though retaining a modest glimmer of hope that the
tooth-grinding would not present itself
to be necessary at this stage of her torture.
Her unwillingness to face
what lay ahead for the day made her take extra time to get ready. She vigilantly
brushed her teeth on the old, porcelain sink next to her bed while staring back
at her sleepy, brown eyes on the square mirror on top of it. The reflective
surface was old with speckled, black areas and an asymmetrical crack running
down the middle of it that was cutting the image of her face in two pieces.
Nina studied herself in the
mirror reproachfully. She couldn’t quite decide whether she had the kind of
looks that were worthy of a beauty pageant ribbon or resembling something that
had crawled out of the earth and would scare small children away. She looked,
for lack of a better word, torn. Her antithetic appearance had mostly to do
with the fact that though her skin and facial features had the proportions and
texture akin to a porcelain doll, her demeanor and expression was either that
of constant bewilderment, annoyance or at best withdrawal and
absent-mindedness. It was enough to make a pretty face look out of place and
under certain lighting even grotesque. She hadn’t always looked like that
though. Nina had time and again studied pictures of herself from the time
period ranging from babyhood to early adolescence and she had come to the
conclusion that she had looked decidedly pretty in a definitely not antithetic,
in fact emphatic, way. Entering adolescence though, the suspicion of something
weird and irritating started seeping into her content and happy-go-lucky
visage. And it grew and grew until it took over her harmonious facial
proportions and twisted them a few millimeters to the side of ‘what the..?’
Despite that, she did not look ugly in the least and that was perhaps the most
discomforting element about her because what she looked like did not have a
name and could not be categorized into something familiar and appeasable. She
looked unfamiliarly disconcerted. It was enough to drive an onlooker into callous
distress.
Nina splashed some water on
her face and observed her dichotomized image on the mirror once more. Drops of
water were running down her features, some splashing onto the porcelain, some
resting on top of her freckles and eyebrows, stinging icily as they started to
evaporate. She rested her clear, plastic toothbrush back in the coffee mug on
the top of the sink along with the still wet painting brushes that she had
washed clean of any residual oil paint late, last night. The coffee mug had a
picture of a sad clown holding a nearly-deflated, red balloon on it the sight
of which had an oddly uplifting effect on Nina, who following her modest beauty
routine resentfully made to get dressed by grabbing on to the most comfortable,
worn-in pair of trousers in her possession in an attempt to try and minimize
her discomfort for the day as greatly as humanly possible. She treated the old
pair of jeans with unprecedented kindness as she slid them slowly and carefully
across each leg and smoothed them out around the ankles; an action that she
found altogether unnecessary yet oddly soothing. Having done that, she found
momentary solace in the comfort of choosing a top that would best reflect her inner
longings and aspirations while complementing her eye-color and pale complexion.
Having failed to find one, she settled for a simple red sweater.
Breakfast that day seemed
like a much more complicated affair though. The feeling that her teeth
squashing together at the expense of nerve and oral soft-tissue had been producing
was prohibiting of any kind of crunchy or sticky material entering her mouth any
time soon. All the better, she
thought, having had some extra time she would make her favorite; French toast, which I rarely ever have, she
decided. Why is it that pain in any form,
as long as it is quite noticeable, makes us actually pay attention to the
things that we want?, she asked herself rhetorically.
With an intense smell of
cinnamon flooding the room Nina sat on her little, mint-green kitchen table and
picked slow bites around her French toast staring out at the vibrant blue sky.
There was not a cloud in sight that morning. The undiluted blue was almost
spilling on top of the roof tops and tree branches below it. She stopped eating
for a minute to take in the color and even closed her eyes in order to allow it
to wash over her undisturbed. When she opened them again in pursuit of another bite
of her toast she realized with glee that she had pecked the shape of what
seemed to be a chicken out of it. In order to admire the figure better she
lifted her plate up as vertically as she could and turned it against the light.
Yes, she concluded, definitely a chicken.
Just as she was about to
leave the plate down and resume her eating though the French toast-chicken
overcame what little friction was holding it onto the porcelain and quite
suddenly spilled out of the plate and onto Nina’s linoleum floor with a low,
wet thump. Nina slouched down assiduously to look at it once more. “Yep, a
chicken, for sure” she exclaimed.
Since Dr. Stingworth’s
office, Dr. Stingworth being her - through no actual fault of his own – odious new
dentist, was in the center of the city and not too far from Nina’s apartment, she
decided to walk there. Walking was her transportation method of choice and she never
passed up on an opportunity to go somewhere on foot other than using any different
means of delivering her to a destination. It is not that she had anything
against cars or busses but the simple fact that walking helped her think.
True to form she was now
thinking of excuses not to attend her appointment all the way to it. Poisonous
breakfast has left me with crippling diarrhea. There’s been a sudden death in
the family. My dog Fluffy is choking on
his rubber toy and has to be rushed to the hospital. One grim scenario
after another played out inside her head with escalating hilarity until the
moment she brought herself right in front of the building specified in the
address she had written down on a torn piece of newspaper while taking
directions from Dr. Stingworth’s secretary, which was now sitting crumpled and
smudged from sweat in her hand.
Nina inhaled and exhaled a
few times, trying to think happy thoughts and expel the negative energy that
was weighing her down like an anchor to the side of the pavement.
“This boat needs to blow its
horn and sail to merrier harbors. I’m getting a horrible feeling in my stomach,
but fortunately it’s nothing a little pillaging and a lot of rum won’t fix” she
said out loud. Referring to herself as a boat or a pirate was something she
frequently did in times of extreme stress or intoxicated euphoria. This was
mainly due to her early childhood aspiration of becoming a pirate which had
always been her first choice of vocation ever since she had become aware of the
concept of work and the specialized resolutions that it entailed. Becoming a
pirate and sailing the seas was irrevocably, one might say, her childhood dream
up until the moment she was informed of the current evolution of that particular
profession in modern times which altogether excluded the exploration of the
seas wearing a sword, a glass eye and a matching parrot in pursuit of treasure
with the occasional raping and pillaging thrown in for good measure. Having
failed, due to unsurpassable technical difficulties, to adopt such a lifestyle
however did not rob her of the desire for sailing or loosing an eye in a
sword-fight and subsequently replacing it with a glass equivalent.
“Oh, don’t be such a coward,” she muttered to
herself glumly. “This will be a learning experience.
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