Regan Brown

English 4

Donohoe P2

Personal Narrative

9/18/14

Lick Your Teeth Clean

You wouldn’t know me these days. In the years since I last saw you I’ve learned to hide against

the stiff flanks of buildings that leer over the fence out front ­ the one we used to peek through, eyes

pressed eagerly into knots in peeling wood, always with the hope of glimpsing some fantasy creature

crouched among the leaf litter and cigarette stubs. I’ve learned my share of cautions, too: written with

barbed wire knocked into my ribs and ticked like obscene purple check marks across my knuckles

(“Job well done,” it reads. I didn’t even cry, for all the bruised and bone, and I think you’d smile

privately to hear it). I’ve been whittling myself a new shape, one with a strong back and a scowl. I am

waxing and waning. I am pulsing. I am smaller and huger and more textured than you now.

I cut my hair. Last winter, possessed of impulsive aspiration and reckless with bright longing, I

made friends with my desire to strip and to fill. I built myself a staggering tower of old books, new

words with splitting spines and wizened pages, and then one day when I was aching only for something

that my own hands had commanded, I cut the whole mess off. I think of you, with your long, dark hair

and uncomplicated smile, and I don’t believe you’d be ashamed. I don’t even think you’d be afraid. I

remember your wild softness and the dirt on your knees and the way you used to buck and snarl and

laugh, breathing the thing stomping its feet inside you, and I think you’d be proud.

You used to tell people your middle name with a grimace. You wore words like shaggy

sweaters, too large for your narrow shoulders and too garish. Memories I press into the backs of

drawers, you wrapped across your chest like protection. I understand now. I’ve shrugged dozens of

names off my back and etched a hundred more in the margins of notebooks, stuck them between the

teeth of print figures, folded them under ears, choked them out in coils of shy, shy poetry reeling like

some secret, sacred python. I know the savage pleasure of defacing the dictionary. I know the pleasure

of shedding and shredding and rubbing out the ink on my birth certificate. In retrospect, I wonder if you

wouldn’t prefer the feral vernacular I’ve found stashed at the bottom of my stomach to the pressed and

starched lines you were taught to read so well and which you professed, mechanically, to love.

I think of laying my hand on your little shoulder and telling you all these things. I imagine you’d

be rapt, showing baby fang with your freckled face upturned, and god ­ I’d take your hand and we’d

dance a ruthless, careless number across the years of worry. I’d whisper that one day the lead in your

feet twill spread, slowly, to glaze the inside of your throat. I’d tell you that some days, the departure of

moonlight will inspire only aching and that some days, you’ll want nothing more than to curl in on

yourself like 3 AM roadkill on the floor, your bones as heavy as your tongue. Some days, you’ll allow

your belly to be exposed, mostly on accident. This is only sometimes as bad as you think it is. You’ll

slash through all those imposed aspirations strung around your neck and between your fingers and under

your skin, and standing in the pretty plastic shreds, your mother will cry in front of you.

I am the heaving thing you were told to run from. You learned so well how to be soft of mouth

and gentle­eyed, reciting to yourself meticulous scrolls of good deeds like a prayer, plastering them over

guttural vitality with obedience. I am the thing you were taught to condemn but couldn’t. For this reason,

childhood is blurry; it feels like a question against my tongue and holds no feeling in my stomach. But I

remember fullness somewhere, and I want you to know that there will be good things. While wholeness

is skittish these days, it will come running sometimes, colliding into your chest with the force of

Everything. It will stay for a short time and then it will climb out your windpipe and go before you can

swallow. It will go. It will go but it is not gone.

If I could, I’d tell you all these things. I would, I swear it. I’d look my reflection in the eye and

drag your shadow up by the tail from the hollowed out parts of me where it must live, still and sleeping.

I’d hunt for you in hedges and in blanket forts and closets, the way we used to shovel up handfuls of

mud after a rainstorm just to cradle the cold worms in our hands, their unearthed bodies soft and

vulnerable. I’d tell you all these things ­ and it’s okay, you’re okay, you did fine. You are ragged and

bottomless. You are a holy presence and you stand before me when I blink. Chin up. Teeth bared.

(You will call this home again someday.)