I remember I cried before and during and even after. Sometimes I feel like I am still crying. Huge wet rolling tears that make veins grow in my eyes and the skin around my nose turn chap and peel.
I cried all the way home for no reason. I felt no pain, no remorse. I just felt numb. My mom laid me down in my bed and I was all ready to go back to sleep when I realized there was still gauze in my mouth.
My tongue is plastered to the gauze.
I am still bleeding.
A lot.
All over.
All over my mouth, my hair, my pillow. The blood is hot and sweet on my tongue. I can feel it pooling in the back of my throat. Where is all this blood coming from? My brain? Am I bleeding out my mind, my memories? My vision was swimming and I couldn’t hold up my head.
This is the instance where my childhood is erased, where my memories become scratched out film, and the numbness sets in. When my oral surgeon reached in and touched the surface of my mind.
My mom applied pressure to the incision with her fingertips to stopper the flow of memories. Plugging up the pool and letting the warm memories slosh around, lost, indecipherable, inside my head. Hot dusty images of boulders, limestone, and an old stain red house splash around in the pool. Lemonade stands swim beside sand castles and best friends in dark blood. Responsibilities drown evenings spent discussing forever and my mother presses down harder. Causing the warm pool of memories to splash against the inside walls of my head.
It didn’t stop. The blood continued to seep past her fingertips. It trickled around the grooves in her nails and ran down the length of her fingers in thin dark lines. She called the surgeon, who told her to plug me up with Lipton Tea bags, something about the acidic quality of the black tea base numbing my gums and speeding up the healing process.
The surgeon had cut open my pallet as if he were dissecting a frog. He sliced a little door into the roof of my mouth. Leaving long tender hinges on either side. Then using the blunt edge of his scalpel he peeled them back and gazed through the frame.
I imagine he could see everything, and the lamp he kept a firm grip on just above my head furthered his rang of sight, past my ridged pallet, through the marrow of my bone and the gray spaghetti mass of my brain. He laughed at my young brain and dipped his hands into a well that was only beginning to fill with liquid dark memories. He drank from his palms. Innate wisdom and innocence fell from between his fingers. Ignorance ran dark red down his chin. After a long moment he straightened out his spine and smiled in a small, forgiving way. He stumbled back and fell into his plush white chair, leaving dark red handprints behind when he lifted his hands from the arms.
Later he sewed me back together, slowly and with a precision that was not present before. An affinity had grown between us a he drank my youth from my innocent body.
My mother plugged me up with Lipton Tea an hour later. With acid, and numbness. My blood soaked the dry herbs inside the tea bag and little twigs and leaves fell out of the seams in the bag into my blood stream. The bag leaked unwanted responsibilities but my memories didn’t come back with the twigs and leaves. When I asked my mother about what had happened to them she squeezed my shoulder and handed me a powdery white pill and a glass of water.
“Take this,” she said, “it will help you with the pain.”
“I’ve already forgotten it.” I said.
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