I recently learned the idiom “milk teeth”—wherein a newborn child comes into the world without any visible teeth, yet twenty-something baby teeth lurk under the gummy surface. Deciduous fixtures until they’re replaced by a later permanency. Milk teeth are a metaphor for innocence and immaturity. Unadulterated, the way we came into this world; deterministic, knowing we must shed them to survive. Baby teeth promise purity. They grow into the inchoate forms of our still formless beings—early signs of who we may become, temporary scaffolds until we become that person.
This is a ghost story. A horror where we think we know one reality, but then all the true pieces of us fall out, one by one. Only to be supplanted by a solidness we were capable of all along. Calcified phantoms where our real self lurks beneath, bracing for revelation from the plush gallows of our gums. A fallout, then eruption anew.
In the canyon of naïveté, we bear no marks the world. We open our mouths wide and present rows of stubby shapes; couldn’t clamp our jaws over things we actually want because it will not hold. Biteless. We ask ourselves when our teeth might come in. (when i might sink my open mouth into flesh and leave marks behind; when i may finally leave an imprint.) The front teeth we first show in our smiles; the canines we allow to pierce and puncture; and eventually the wisdom that surprises us when we come of age.
This is also a story of how we do not know ourselves. Our mouths mold around our adopted shapes: babbling, grasping, and lisping. Toothless existence. I hear people say they do not know what they want, or what they stand for. They can form the necessary sounds for articulation, but those words tumble out all the same without conviction at the root. A mimicry of a skeleton, bones and all—not yet enough to carve out a claim. There is no certainty to it. We want to mean something; we want to matter. We are waiting for our teeth to come in.
I often invoke sharp teeth. The contours of the image feel familiar and visceral. Evokes wolfish grins, unapologetic bite. Implies we know ourselves well enough to say the things we really mean. Pleasantries shorn with bared teeth, beliefs impressed with scathing venom. Teases just what we might be capable of, of care, courage, and cruelty. When we are older, scarcely wiser—we hope we have cut our teeth to withstand, and sunk deeply enough to stake. A sharp, seething solidness.
When our milk teeth are shed, we find edge and finality. Brutal bruxism; we make demands, get what we want, and leave a dent. (sometimes, i wish we would have been born more lethal; and able to tear into softness with hardened instincts from the beginning.) Open, clamp, heldfast. Sharp teeth sunk into a nebulous mass, to take a voracious bite of the world; peeled back to reveal the incontrovertible, inexorable imprint of oneself.