Toothache

Sleep has been a mystery to me for many years now. My preteens came and so began the restlessness. I’ve always been a night owl, no question about it. It was even something I prided myself on. I would brag about staying up till two in the morning and waking up at four am just so I could be awake before everyone else. It was cool to be so bad at sleeping.

I didn’t talk about the barbed wire I knotted my thoughts in every night, all the rituals swirling in my head, begging to be completed before I could give in to the quiet. The quiet in my head was frightening, and if I didn’t lock my thoughts up right they were bound to pick their way free, scratching at my corneas and tingling at my fingertips until I was forced awake.

The best method for sleep I have found is to simply let it take you when you’re preoccupied with something else. A television show playing or music strumming loudly, lights on and friends talking around you.

Summers as a kid, that’s the last time tired felt good. Washing my hands of frog slime and brushing the chocolate from my teeth, with campfire smoke clinging to my clothes I would drag myself to the top bunk. I’d wrap my blankets around me, cooled just right by the night air and tuck my tired head against a homemade pillowcase. I’d drink in the refreshing dark air, ignoring the spider in the corner of the ceiling, and think of nothing but what adventures tomorrow would bring. I’d like to become familiar with that version of sleep again.

But sleep is hard in a body you’re an alien to. I toss and turn, trying to understand the foreign shapes and stretches the body I possess creates with every twist. I haven’t felt at home in this body since I was a kid. Since staining my hands green with ferns and building hideouts from fallen trees, since drinking lemonade in the garage brainstorming what to do next, since racing on bikes and making the sharpest of turns, unafraid of the asphalt eating my skin.

The dissent with my body began when I was 10, and the kid across the street started to separate me from him and the other kids on the basis that I was a girl, pressing that word into my brain like a brand on skin. The heat of the day buzzed like static around all of us kids as we stood in the street, I could feel the rage rushing through me just as strongly as I could feel the burning black pavement against my bare feet. He threw the word in my face; “girl.” Like I was supposed to understand why that made me different from any of them. I stuck my ground, refusing to leave. But things were different after that. I started trailing further and further behind, becoming defensive when anyone treated me differently. Turning sour and spiteful to anyone who brought up the fact that I was a girl.

From there the race began, to be the best at fishing, the best at catching frogs, the best at not caring, the best at karate, the best at building forts, the best at breaking and smashing things. I was desperate to not grow into this thing they told me I already was. But soon even my parents started enforcing that I wasn’t the same. No, I couldn't sleep in the same room as them. No, I couldn't be alone in the tree house with that many boys. No, outdoor chores were for boys. I cried when my mom told me I was starting puberty. When she told me I was going to start growing a chest.

My natural response to an uncomfortable and over stimulating environment is to retreat into myself, so that's what I did. For years. It seemed like I couldn’t do anything to stop the inevitability of growing into a girl. So my defense mechanism kicked in, I disappeared from my life, welding those thoughts of confusion and anger into a hot ball of metallic blood and iron and dropping it from the edge of the furthest cliff in my head. I didn’t consciously think about it for years. It sat at the base of that cliff, salt water eating at it and growing barnacles. It rolled around in my body, an ailment I didn’t want to acknowledge, keeping me from being me. Talking got harder, having friends grew more difficult, sleep became foreign.

I’m nearly 20 now, and this is the first year I’ve acknowledged this part of me. This is the first time I’m recognizing on paper that I’m perhaps in the wrong body. Realizing this has brought much with it. I know why my jaw hurts now, but the tooth is still decaying.

In 2022 I want to remember that confused kid, and let them live as who they truly are. I want to rub peppermint and guava leaves on that toothache. I want to understand that side of myself, to let the version of me everyone knows remember mourning doves and spring peepers and dirt underneath my fingernails. I want to remember exhaustion from laughter and the sun, not stress and fear. To feel my feet grow weary from being myself and not from propping up someone I'm not. To accept the quiet darkness as a place for restfulness and contemplation, not anything to avoid.

To remember sleep.