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In October, in the Fairbanks dark, a person can get lost.
When I’m shaken awake by the racing of my own heart it’s 2:49 AM and everything is still and warm and smells like my own breath and my own skin. There’s no one to steady me. And three in the morning is dangerous, the witching hour, when who-knows-what will pry my mouth open and steal my teeth.
The phone trills over and over. No one picks up. I see someone I knew from across the street; is laughing because he doesn’t see me. I wonder if it feels good to leave me behind and then I guess it probably does.
I woke up because I woke up a little bit and nothing made sense yet. Half-dreaming, I felt my arm asleep when I rolled over and I worried my heart was dying or my arm was gone or torn off or stolen.
I read a scary story as a kid about a girl who takes her very sick mother to the city for medical treatment. The daughter leaves her mother to grab painkillers to tide her over before their appointment. After getting run around by a confused taxi driver, the daughter returns to the hotel with the medicine just to find her mother disappeared and the room totally different—none of the staff knows her. Eventually, defeated, the daughter is forced to leave the city as the only one who remembers who she is, or why she came.
Apparently, this story is based on an urban legend about Paris in the 1800s. In the legend, the mom had the Black Plague. Instead of inciting panic by announcing that someone had died of the Plague in the middle of Paris, the government had found it easier to erase the girl and her mom from existence entirely.
The phone trills and no one picks up.
I always wondered if losing my teeth would be something I knew the taste of just by seeing, like a smoky crisp fall afternoon, or polished black boot leather, or a sundog. I was right, I know it exactly, except it’s the taste of my own body-metal coming out of me.
The only thing I can do well enough these days is collect the ways I hurt and count them like grains of rice. What happens, I wonder, when I don’t want to talk about bones anymore.
I dreamed I swung one leg over me and leaned down so close I could feel my hair brush my cheek. I dreamed that I opened my mouth and hooked two fingers behind my curved teeth and turned my head side to side slowly, appraising. I dreamed that I stroked my tongue with my fingers and sighed and didn’t even consider biting down.
I call my friend who picks up because it’s 7:49 AM there and they were awake and just thinking about me. They have to go walk their dog but they can talk later. I call my other friend who picks up because it’s 1:49 AM where she is and she was just thinking about me. When I tell her the way my dreams taste, she says, “Yeah, that’s just one of those things that’s endlessly compelling when you’re in the middle of it, I think.”
I dreamed I ran over the neighbor’s dog yesterday. My eyes were open and I felt the car bounce. But I looked in my rearview mirror and there he was, the dog, barking hoarsely and wagging his tail in wide lazy circles. His owner waved at me, held him by the collar to keep him out of my way. I cried with gratitude. Besides my sobbing, the inside of my car was silent because I hadn’t turned on any music yet.
The wall above the closet in my bedroom is splitting open like rotten fruit. It started as a hairline crack but now it’s opening because of the way the house shakes every day and makes the doorway sag.
I call my other friend who picks up because it’s 11:49 PM where she is and she was just thinking about me. Am I okay? I say yes but tomorrow is my appointment with a surgeon who acts as though everything is a huge hassle by slouching and speaking to me in a very bored voice.
The phone trills and no one picks up.
In a book I love, The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi, a Santeria emissary named Yemaya Saramagua lives in a house with two doors: one to London, and one to Lagos, called the Somewherehouse. When the Somewherehouse floods, water drips from the ceilings; splits the walls open and pours through the cracks, floats the bed off the floor.
The phone trills and no one picks up.
Tomorrow, no one will know who I am. Everything will be an inside joke that I will be outside of. I will hear the words and see the laughing but I won’t understand the relation. My eyes will open wider as if I could let meaning in like light but the words will float away like a bunch of balloons, like beds, like birds, like everything. I dreamed that I cradled my face in my palms and felt it electric and everywhere. I dreamed that I fell back down onto my hips onto mine and told me, God is a lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind.
The phone trills and no one picks up.
In Larissa Pham’s Fantasian, a queer Asian Yalie stumbles upon her doppelganger in the bathroom at a house party. The doppelganger, Dolores, is perched on the side of the tub reading Jacques Lacan’s “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I” on her phone. The narrator has never read Lacan, so Dolores reads her a line out loud about knowledge being mediated by the Other’s desire. This, she explains, is the mirror stage: Ego formation via recognition of oneself in a mirror.
That’s just the idea the narrator needed to finish a project she’s been stuck on. The two marvel at the coincidence. They seem to know each other already, nearly telepathic. They move in unison, self and reflection. The world changes in the shrinking space between them. Dolores sees our narrator through the patterns they notice in the world. In each other’s eyes, they become visible. When they finally fuck it’s like closing a circuit, completing a loop, like looking into a mirror’s reflection all the way into infinity.
What I need to know from the surgeon during the appointment but can’t ask is what to do if you are a balloon in your own hand and when they cut you accidentally let go. The last time I got painkillers that felt like being filled all the way full to the top of my head with sweet warm honey. I laid on the couch and looked up through the skylights at the blue blue. Fear was physically impossible, so I was content.
The phone trills and no one picks up.
When I leave my room in the morning there’s white fog all around my apartment. My fans are on, my burners are off, my oven is off, my microwave is off. I bat at the air, trying to move the fog. It doesn’t go. I turn the fan on high and the fog doesn’t move.
The phone trills and no one picks up.
Outside my door, snow piles up.
I cup my hand around my chin and don’t even have to squeeze, I open it for me. Whatever I give me, I’ll be grateful. But before I can think, I dig my nails right into the joint of my jaw and pushes crunch and pulls crunch and rips my jaw clean off.
Tonight, we finally get our teeth.
