Jawbone Ache

That fear and frustration that used to catch my elbows at the bend lives inside of my jaw now. I am helpless to the vice that feels like it is trying to pry my teeth from their gummy homes one by one, starting from the back.

It was not always this way.

There is a story someone might tell you if you asked them enough, in which the hero of no one’s tale but my own takes up arms against any single hurdle. I was not aware that I could simply walk around those leaps until much later. Much too late.

My two hands, and the sometimes lifeless body they are adjoined to the end of, the same hands that I hold my love with, pet my pug, clothe myself with, feed those around me with, those very same fingers clenched into fists have the memory of elephants. Still able to recall what the feeling of crunching bone and rusty quarters felt like.

It was a long time ago – or at least that is what I tell myself when I’m not one hundred percent convinced that I’ve actually made any progress in this damn place – that find joy in intimidation or violence. I sought calm within combat. I felt useful.

I spoke with La Reine’s folks today, tried to coax something more than a grandparent’s text message worth of elaboration and expulsion from them. I can only be so observant; making it not exactly a surefire way to learn. Which is why I pry. Inquire. Interrogate, some have called it.

In disarming fashion, I always seem to find myself well shy of elaboration or even expletives when my temperature rises, and I feel some sort of furious.

This in its own right, unfairly complicates the issue.

Why is it that my frustration, automatically unequips what I consider to my greatest weapon and asset as it pertains to the solving and facing the world. My go-to has gone. And I am forsaken to fight with my bare hands or bare tongue. I am not sure which is worse, physically hitting something -- that lightning in your shoulder blades -- or being stripped of my ability to share what I am thinking or feeling.

However, I keep drifting back into this museum. Strung up failures in pretty little frames hung up all haphazardly. No ropes. No alarms. No security.

I do not even think I paid to get in. Simply, I was not there one moment, and inside the next.

No future exists in which I do not get to be fully responsible for all of those crossed letters, harsh punctuation on an already hard-to-salvage sentence. Periodically, I wish I could shirk that memorabilia. However, I know that if I wish to maintain the delight of being culpable and responsible for who I am today, that comes with a whole lot of fine print. Cliff notes.

So, while the ache lives in my jaw, like grub digging in, settling down, making less room for the sturdiness of bone, I am almost happy that this is my reality. An incessant desire to unhinge my jaw, yawn away the stiff or slam my teeth together so hard that the maggots in my cheeks find another home, is all far more acceptable than an alternative I can never forget.

Somewhere around my twenty-eighth, I began to feel free. There was ocean air inside the lungs that had been caged-up and sucking on exhaust for decades. Often, I would find myself overcompensating on the throttle. Never a detriment, but always feeling a step or twelve behind. My peers. My siblings. My family. What family? The one I chose, or the one I was given? Roaming around in the wild now, I can tell that this air is better for my blood than anything I had ever inhaled before.

Unfortunately, that does not make me impervious to the thought, or the desire, or the impulse, to conjure some pollution to ingest. Luckily, the days in which I find that I have an instinct to hit the hum out of my hands so few and far between. I shake. I quickly lose my flat-footing. But the nail marks in my palms are a product of flexing instead of flustering or fighting.

Headaches are the worst of it. Rumbling. Stranding headaches.

My idle hands pick apart my fingers, making physically writing anything down just as strenuous and practically painful as trying to think about what I ought to say.

At least I am coping. I feel able, unstable, but frantically in charge.