braces Fido I'm ready. Grr. I can take it. This isn't the first time I've been Kicked in the groin. And chances are It won't be the last. 030422 ... raze the thanik brothers were my orthodontists. i always got the younger brother. daman. i was afraid of him. he looked like the villain in a bad horror film. i think he was born without the ability to smile. he was always building some new addition to the city he made inside my mouth. i never left his office without at least one piece of unchecked steel cutting into the mucous membrane that lined my cheeks, digging into me until i bled. until eating was agony. until it hurt to speak. i had to take an old birthday candle and hammer the fuck out of his sloppy craftsmanship to try and flatten it out enough so i could get some relief. i would smear the sharp edges of what i couldn't see with the candle's wax when nothing else did any good. blue candle. white stripes. then i'd have to go see him again so he could fix what he'd done. bryan adams would be singing on the radio about how he was finding it hard to believe we were in heaven, and i'd be thinking, you and me both, man. i only got the older brother once. he knew how to smile. he was gentle. he didn't hurt me. he made a mold of my mouth with thick pink gloop that smelled like the inside of a hospital and said, "here comes the jell-o. open wide for jell-o!" maybe he wasn't even real. maybe he was a friendly ghost. the day the braces came off, daman brought me into his office and showed me the mold he made of my teeth when i first came to see him. it looked like a ruined mountain. nothing was where it was supposed to be. i think he wanted me to thank him. to tell him how brilliant he was and how much i appreciated what he'd done for me. i just didn't want him to hurt me anymore. i still had to wear a retainer. and he gave me this black mouthguard i was supposed to wear through the night. i always thought it looked like a hockey puck. the shitty taste of new plastic never went away. the retainer didn't bother me much, but the mouthguard tore up my gums. i remember eating an apple, and by the time i was finished the flesh was red with my blood. there was no white left anywhere. "there's a lot of money in your mouth," my stepfather kept saying. "you better take care of those teeth." every cent he spent came back through his health coverage at work. i stopped brushing my teeth for a while. they were perfect. i wanted them to rot and fall out. i stopped wearing the retainer. i threw the mouthguard in the garbage. i only got one cavity. i think i still have my retainer somewhere. if i ever find it, i'm going to smash it with a hammer until it's nothing but pink dust. 211008 ... tender square immediately after i had my braces removed in the eighth grade, i cried. i thought i looked like i had horse teeth, they were too big for my mouth. i didn’t want anyone to see my new smile. my lips felt weird against the smoothness of my teeth, like they had been stretched out from all the metal that had been living in my mouth for years. my teacher, mrs. yaworski, asked me to show her the results when i got back to school, and i did, albeit reluctantly. she told me my smile was beautiful. (and this may be a gross admission, but i totally still have my grade-school retainer. in fact, i use it every night for bed. it wasn’t always this way; i started grinding my teeth in my twenties due to stress and eventually i grew to hate my night guard. the retainer ended up being a much more comfortable fit, while also keeping my ever-shifting teeth aligned.) 211008 ... raze sometimes i wish i'd stuck it out and kept using my retainer too. i just couldn't do it anymore. i got lucky; only one or two bottom teeth shifted a little bit. my wisdom_teeth did more damage than my own neglect ever did. my top right molar is a crooked little bastard thanks to all that questionable wisdom. i swear he's plotting something sketchy right now. 211008 what's it to you? who go blather from