by David Reames
I started having panic attacks again.
I find discussing panic attacks—particularly my own—outside of any clinical context, rather tiresome, even boring. The experience really only pops for the one actually having the attack. Beyond that, the conversation goes something like this:
“How was your flight?”
“Not too bad at all, except for the panic attack.”
“You had a panic attack? Are you ok?”
“I’m completely, totally, physically fine. It’s just every once in a while, for a few minutes, my mind makes me know—not believe, but know—that I am absolutely, unequivocally dying.”
“Sucks.”
“But the inflight service did have Biscoffs!”
By the fourth month of lockdown, many nights I lay in bed and stared into the darkness at the ceiling, desperate to fall into a deep, restorative sleep. Sometimes I gave up and would read on my smartphone or stream a movie, but by then it seemed I had seen all the movies, watched all the shows, and my racing, mutinous mind would not brook the focus required to read a book. So I lay there, the imperfections in my ceiling becoming easier and easier to see as night became dawn.
When I did sleep, it was fitful and sweaty.
For years my dentist told me I was a night bruxer, that is, I suffer from bruxism, or teeth grinding, while I sleep. He once even fitted me with a very expensive mouthguard that I used for a week or so before abandoning it because it made me gag.
Early on in these insomnio-maniacal days, I managed to drift off only to awaken abruptly as my head fell off the pillow I was hugging in a death grip as I slept. This awakening was so abrupt, in fact, that I caught myself bruxing, something I never actively experienced before. Until that moment, my bruxing had occurred exclusively within the confines of my sleep. I have to think it an exceptionally rare occurrence for anyone, as the experience leaves one nearly overcome with horror and the need to go running from the house with the howling fantods, not into my dentist’s arms, but into the nearest psychiatric center.
Best not; it turns out the treatment for this symptom is singular and universal: a $740 molded mouthguard.
Until I heard that skull-filling crunch in the instant that my head slipped off the edge of my pillow, I did not think my bruxing was of such moment that it should require I gag on a chunk of molded latex every night for the rest of my life.
Here is how I was bruxing:
I was placing my lower left cuspid—the fang-like canine tooth—firmly against the back of my upper left cuspid. With all my strength (and I do mean all) I was pushing sideways with my entire lower jaw, focusing all of my muscular torsion—roughly 162 lbs/inch² in the average human*—tooth-on-tooth into that single upper cuspid.
In that moment, my head slipped from the pillow clutched in my arms, waking me, and my clenched jaw, while still flexed outrageously, slipped sideways, causing most of my bottom teeth to abruptly, violently grind along the corresponding uppers with a tectonic CHONGK.
Consider all of the unconscious safeguards that our central nervous system has in place to protect us from say choking by involuntarily orienting food in our mouths as we eat, or to prevent us from biting through our own cheeks or biting off our tongues as we chew our food.
All of those infinitesimal nerve endings in the mouth and tongue, fine twitch muscle fibers, synaptic coordination working together on a cosmically large scope, within our mouths, all evolved over a period of time of a geologic scale, so that we can take nourishment from the world around us through our mouths.
So then why, in the face of all of these profound neurological complexes that humans have developed through high-level evolution, should a neurologically healthy** person’s oral neurology betray them in the night? To what end, this act of auto-sabotage? Why does my mind conscript my jaw into the service of slow and inefficient self-assassination? And under cover of night! Like a filthy thief in the temple.
Why in the silence of slumber should my unquiet mind seek to grind away my teeth? To undo this aspect of essential self? What is there to this act of self-erasure? Maybe the answer lies along another line of inquiry: How long does it take for teeth to decompose after we die?
The truth is, no one knows for sure. If one wishes not to give oneself an acute case of the heebie-jeebies, one would do well not to ponder the uncountable number of small handfuls of teeth that lay in the earth. Long after the flesh has been given over to the worm, the bones have moldered to nothing, the last person has uttered our name for the last time, all written records have turned to powder, and all digital records have corrupted,*** it turns out our teeth may endure.****
Even that greatest of Nature’s purifiers—fire—cannot commit our teeth to ash. Police and insurance companies rely on dental records to identify these tiny, intact—if slightly blackened—remains of victims of catastrophic conflagration.
In view of the infinite, the tooth is perhaps our most enduring bond to the cosmos. Long after our Sun collapses in star death and the earth shatters like a brittle clay pot, or is consumed when the sun goes supernova, can it not be credited that as the debris scatters to the cosmos, at least some few teeth will persist, whistling soundlessly through the void at incalculable speed until they are consumed by a black hole?
Perhaps that tooth could persist even beyond. If a person is the accretion of the stuff of stars, a conduit through which the universe can experience itself, is there anything closer to the notion of the human spirit within god’s grace than to cry out: I lived once, too!
To take a bite out of the ass of the heavens?
Evaluate your flossing regimen accordingly.
Perhaps whatever is the stuff of a soul*****—my soul—does not seek to erase, unmake, or otherwise commit to nocturnal auto-sabotage. Perhaps it instead hears my feeble, buried cries, and when I do at last sleep, this soul is wakeful and stands sentry on a dark corner in the bad neighborhood that lies between my ears. It is there in the night to take my fears and my hurts, so that I do not rub out that part of me which is softer and easily broken, yet all the more vital for that softness. And so that I may shine brighter tomorrow, it focuses on the one part of me that is surely the most like itself—my eternal teeth.
*Human jaw muscles move in a complex three-dimensional manner. There are three jaw-closing muscles (masseter, temporalis, and medial pterygoid) and two jaw-opening muscles (lateral pterygoid and digastric). The internal architecture of the jaw muscles is complex, with many exhibiting a pennate internal architecture. Within each of the jaw muscles, the central nervous system appears capable of activating separate compartments with specific directions of muscle fibers. This means that each jaw muscle is capable of generating a range of force vectors (magnitude and direction) required for particular jaw movements, classified as voluntary, reflex, or rhythmical.
**Presumably. I haven’t had any kind of medical or scientific examination to this troubling issue. Just the mouth guard my dentist sold me. It is entirely possible I have some mild and rare form of epilepsy, or so Google suggests this alarming possibility.
***As of this writing, leading technology will only claim 99.999999999% data durability.
****In 2016, archaeologists digging in Eppelsheim, Germany uncovered two teeth from early primates that belong to the same phylogenetic superfamily (Hominoidea) as Homo sapiens. Radiometric dating estimates the objective age of the teeth to be ~9.7 million years old.
*****Consider: On the Soul, Aristotle, c. 350 B.C.
David Reames is a professional artist and writer. He is a senior in the NYUSPS Creative Writing program and lives in Manhattan with his wife and their rescue dog.