Dear Ralph,
My tooth is loose and I’m really scared about how much it will hurt coming out.
Your Buddy Philip
To: my buddy Phillip
I’m real sorry to hear that Philip. Losing teeth is a lot like going through a lifetime of failed relationships. The first loss feels deeply traumatic. Even if people tell you about how it will hurt, there’s really nothing there to help you understand what kind of pain you’re going to have to deal with. But suddenly it appears. This awful thing that wrenches your guts, and the blood, tremendous blood. And after its over there’s a hole that you can fit your tongue inside. The hole goes away I guess but not fast enough that you don’t discover how tender the thing really is. You can’t let anything get near the tender part for a long time, and then even once it’s all sort of healed, you still feel weary of testing it out to see if it will still hurt or not.
Then the teeth start dropping like flies. Two gone almost at once sometimes. It doesn’t make any sense how they can drop out so quickly. How on earth could there be two different holes to deal with. There’s no direction you can turn without running into the problem, so you just don’t eat for a while because it’s too hard to deal with. Crazy stuff Phillip. I will say that sometimes it felt good to just yank that thing out. To taste the blood in your mouth and know that it’s over. I guess I still haven’t figured out how it is that the last few teeth to go don’t really seem to hurt quite as much when they come out. By then you figure out methods for making it a painless process. You push gently over a period of days and then it slides out almost by itself. But then the last one goes and there’s nothing left except crazy things to remember.
Your Friend,
Ralph the Cat
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