Cavity
by Trelaine Ito
The rot begins, like the start of so many deaths, without notice.
Who knows its true origin or how long it has been silently biding its time. Every intake of breath, every bite of food or sip of drink, every exposure to the outside world gives it an almost elemental strength, as if the rot is just as much a part of nature as the clouds in the sky.
One night, at a casual gathering of longtime friends, amongst the recitations of recollected memories and the rehashing of the day’s political landscape, the rot decides to reveal itself.
“It’s actually a funny story,” Jonathan, to your right, begins. You offer a muted chuckle to set his stage, having heard this story a number of times already. But as you do, a sting in one of your lower left molars alerts you to a crescendoing discomfort, one that travels along your jaw, pinching each connecting nerve as it migrates up, settling in your inner ear. Your cheek muscles recoil, withdrawing your smile in defense until, as quickly as it appears, the sting has silenced your laughter.
You immediately forget the less-than-amusing story Jonathan has been recounting to the group, huddled together like penguins in a blizzard. Instead, you stand stone-faced, rubbing your tongue back and forth over the offending tooth, like a mole searching blindly for an invading centipede, its prickly legs dancing around in the darkness. It isn’t quite pain you feel, at least not yet.
“Isn’t that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard?” Jonathan asks in a forced punchline. There’s a murmur of laughter and you think it might be safe to join in by smiling, if anything, to save Jonathan from the humiliation of his bad joke.
But the sting returns, this time as a bite of pain. You instinctively raise your hand to massage your jaw. No one notices, so you try donning a softer grin. But the pull of your cheek muscles disturbs the nerves in your jaw, signaling to the pain in your tooth that it should reemerge.
You return to a dour state of emotionlessness, catching Jonathan’s eye in the process. He notices that you haven’t been laughing. “You get it, right?” he asks, knowing full well that you’ve heard his story before. But you just nod once and he follows up with, “Everything okay?” You nod again, only once again, and he senses something’s wrong. He’s known you long enough to recognize most of your signs. Lack of eye contact. Staring out in the distance. A general distractedness. A more marked reclusiveness. He assumes you are upset for whatever reason. He knows you don’t have to justify your feelings to him. “All feelings are valid,” he’d often repeat, a favorite therapy-speak mantra. The reason itself doesn’t matter, just the resolution. And he knows that when you become like this, it’s best to leave you alone. That’s always been your process, to withdraw and disappear, less like a turtle in its shell and more like a bear in its cave during the winter. Better to let the season pass without engaging in its cold fury. So Jonathan turns to someone else in the circle and tries a different joke.
As you part ways at the end of the party, Jonathan says, “Get home safe. I hope you feel better soon.” He smiles, which you don’t return, and his smile falters a bit. “See you next time,” he says, but with an upward inflection at the end. A question. Because he’s not sure when he will see you next.
The discomfort reemerges consistently over the next week. Every time you interact with another person, the sting creeps from your jaw to your ear and back, a reminder that something unidentifiable is wrong. And you’re no longer pleasant to be around because you’ve decided to remove humor from your everyday life, or at least the response to humor, hoping to starve the sting and bite of the space necessary for their growth. That’s your only defense, the best ward against the increasing pain. Suppressing your smile requires a significant sacrifice, a daily existence marked with a dry scowl frozen on your face, an appearance of unhappiness. You’ve lived without smiling for several days, but that hasn’t been enough. So you stop speaking too.
“Have a good weekend,” you coworker says as you pack up your things. You nod in response, which seems to frighten your coworker. At this point, you are effectively glowering, and even a curt nod seems like a more serious dismissal than intended, the reaction of a sinister robot devoid of human empathy. Over time this appearance of unhappiness takes root as unhappiness itself. Like settling dust in an abandoned room, your discontent blankets every surface without a hint of disruption, noticeable only when disturbed. While the physical discomfort hasn’t spread, instead simply increasing in intensity when triggered, something deeper begins to infect the network of nerves, the signal highways spread throughout your body connecting pain in one location to feeling in all others.
It begins in your mouth. Every movement seems to elicit a pinch, but not in your muscles. No, somewhere deeper, like tiny releases of poisonous chemicals into your body’s circuitry, causing you to slow your motions to avoid the pinpricks. Suddenly your world descends into a stillness punctuated only by your slow, deep breathing. You inhale in triplets. The steady rhythm keeps you occupied, anchoring your mind even as it begins to decay from the lack of stimulation.
But even in your quiet misery, the rot continues to spread. Your shoulders, your arms, your hands, you still them all. You spend hours sitting upright and motionless, watching the black bookshelf in front of the small couch in your bedroom, your reading couch, once known for its great light. But you haven’t raised your blinds in a while and the darkness prevents you from reading. So you stare at the unidentifiable spines of books, unorganized rows of novels and memoirs, some read but most unread. You muster enough strength to use the bathroom, only a few steps from your couch, whenever necessary, which isn’t often considering you seldom eat or drink water, lest your trigger the pain.
You sink into your new normal as one sinks into a well-worn cushion, the lingering impression now so deep that it swallows you whole, enveloping you in the comfort of familiarity. In that way, you are like a Buddhist monk who has relinquished his earthly connection in favor of quiet, inward meditation on an unpaved road toward nirvana. Or nothingness.
As the weekend advances, you almost forget how to start a conversation, how to laugh, how to smile. You even forget the pain, having avoided the slumbering beast by delicately tiptoeing around it. In your silence and stillness, you realize you haven’t heard from your friends, not even from Jonathan. They know you too well, having overlearned past lessons. You imagine Jonathan counseling your other friends. “Give him space,” he says, “and he’ll come to us when he’s ready.” But that’s not entirely true, is it? You’re not sure what you would even say to them. That you’ve experienced pain and it has been too much? That’s also not entirely true. Not true at all. The pain has never been more than you can handle. Just a sting and a bite and a few pinches. It’s you who’s shifted, accommodating the pain’s needs in lieu of your own. But not even the pain itself, merely its potential, preempting the emergence of any discomfort with avoidance, preventing the inevitable increase of the discomfort’s intensity by adjusting fundamental aspects of your life. Like smiling and talking and moving.
If that was the goal, you succeeded. But if you intended to free yourself from the pain, then you might have failed. Because the pain is simply a symptom of the rot, the still unidentified source of your discomfort. And the rot has spread, unimpeded by your tactics to avoid the pain. Eventually the rot travels to your brain. It begins to sever the flow of blood to the epicenter of your mental activity, interrupting your ability to think. Your thoughts flicker like short-circuiting wires interrupting a television show. A final series of images dances across your mind’s eye, the rot’s parting gift: an unremarkable conversation with Jonathan.
It was several months ago. You were walking through your shared neighborhood late on a cloudless night, with nothing but a half-moon and a smattering of streetlamps drowning out the stars with their dull yellow light. Jonathan was looking at you while you spoke, but you were looking ahead at the budding trees. Spring had arrived early this year.
“I’m not where I should be,” you said, thinking it was some profound statement that would explain away everything.
“Like physically?” Jonathan quipped.
“No, I mean, I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Then move. Go somewhere else and try something new. It can’t hurt.”
“Until it does. You don’t think newness can be painful?”
“Sure, but anything can make you feel pain if you let it. So don’t let it.”
“Easier said than done...”
Jonathan stopped walking and turned his head to stare at one of the flowering trees. The air was crisp and the young flowers would wilt and detach sooner than they should. But in this moment, they brought an ethereal beauty to the night, like a pristine painting hung in a dilapidated house, illuminated by a stray moonbeam entering through a gash in the ceiling.
“Do you remember that one time I tried yoga?” Jonathan asked. You shook your head and he continued, watching the still flowers. “Everyone says its good for your mind—and I guess your soul—but I just needed to get better at stretching. So I signed up for a class. About halfway through the workout, we were doing this one uncomfortable pose. Seriously, it was an impossible formation for anyone’s body to make. And the instructor—I refuse to call her a ‘guru’ because she was a thin blonde in Lululemon tights—told us to identify a memory. Just one. Good or bad. And then to recognize its presence, acknowledge its hold on us, its impact, however large or small. And as we pushed through our stretch, to thank the memory and let it go. I remember thinking, ‘This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever done.’ But then I thought about when Vanessa left me. Not the totality of our relationship or its long, drawn-out end, but the exact moment she walked out the door. Most other details are fuzzy, but I remember he outfit so clearly. She was in faded jeans and a green top. She didn’t take anything except her phone and purse. She looked at me one last time and without saying anything, she turned and walked out the door. As painful as our breakup was, I don’t know where we might be now if we had stayed together. But I also can’t deny I’d be a very different person if we had never met. So I thanked her—or, I guess, ‘the memory of her leaving’—and I pushed through the intense pain in my thighs and my lower back, so intense that I could hear droplets of sweat falling onto my mat. But I realized it wasn’t sweat. They were tears. I had let this memory go, and suddenly I was crying. It was the craziest thing. I did that with a couple more memories, acknowledging and thanking and stretching and crying. And when the class was over, the instructor came up to me and said, ‘You did good today. I always think it’s more helpful to acknowledge whatever’s affecting you. Usually it’s something in your past. Once you know the source, you can work through it. With yoga or therapy or even running. Whatever works best for you. But you’ve got to acknowledge the source.’ I didn’t go back to yoga after that, but whenever I remember things, I try to acknowledge them and thank them. And then let them go.”
As if on cue, a flower fell from the tree, twirling as it descended.
You’re not sure what triggers that memory. Is it the silence or the stillness? Have you been inadvertently meditating? But as the rot’s growth in your brain reaches its climax, you sense a stroke beginning. And in that moment, you see the rot so clearly, see its tendrils in your veins and your muscles. See how it has taken control of your body and now your mind. You can’t help but laugh as you both recognize and accept your impending and self-imposed end. After all, you are alone in the dark, and who will find your body? You imagine Jonathan and the others at your wake. “We could’ve helped him,” they all say in unison. “He should’ve come to us.” You’ll never have the opportunity to tell them about the rot, to blame it for your current state, to explain that you would’ve come to them had you recognized earlier what this was.
And just as the rot consumes the last of your mind, the initial sting returns like an old friend, only this time its discomfort is mild compared to the decay spread throughout your body. Dulled by your time without laughter and spoken words and movement and thought, a period that seems like eons longer than the minutes and days it lasted, the sting you once hid from is all you have left, the final reminder of your silent and still end.
As the stroke nears its completion, you can almost hear the sting whisper in your left ear, “I started as a cavity, you know.” But the source, it seems, is now too removed to be cleansed by acknowledgement. What is there left, then, but to thank the rot and to let go.
Trelaine Ito is originally from Hawaii. But, true to form, he saw the line where the sky meets the sea and it called him, so he currently lives and works in Washington, D.C. He enjoys origami and washing dishes and taking pictures of clouds and sunsets—but never sunrises (he’s not a morning person).