You know when you take a bite of that freshly made vanilla/strawberry/whatever-amalgamation-you-like sundae with a bunch of fucking corporate fruits placed on it to make it pretty and it stings your goddamn gum? That’s how I live every fucking second. My life has gone to shit and I don’t know what to fucking do.
To go back to where it started: me and my girlfriend were standing on a bus stop, waiting for a bus to drop us back to college. It must have been kind of late, because I remember it being dark and no one else was waiting. So around midnight. We were both really fucking high and I was rolling a joint trying to be as discrete as a college student zooted off his balls can be. We were both already really spooked because the stop was right next to this giant Banyan tree that housed an ecosystem with its sheer size. If you have never seen a Banyan tree, google it. The roots hanging off of the trees branches looked like they were some ghastly, creepy, weird ghost thing and I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. I was standing and trying to stuff the pot in my grinder as fast as I could but it kept falling off and I was really pissed. That’s when he approached us.
The guy was very obviously homeless and hadn’t showered in weeks. I could smell him before I saw him. One of his hands was behind his back and my absolutely zonked cognition immediately thought he had a knife. It was fucked. He approached us and lingered around the tree for a minute. My girlfriend was uncomfortable and stood right by me the entire time he intently stared at us. I stopped rolling because I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Can I help you with something, man?” I said.
“You are really young to be doing this, aren’t ya?” He replied.
I freaked out at this (internally of course, I couldn’t let the man with the probable knife in his hands know I was afraid of him), because I had actually been in trouble with my dean because I was caught with some pot.
“And how is that any of your business?” I fired back, mustering up the most manly-man Terry Crews voice I could pull off.
He snickered. This motherfucker looked right at my face in his tattered, beaten up clothes and snickered and giggled like he had hit the jackpot. And then he immediately asked the next question, something which will haunt me forever.
“Do you have a cigarette?”
I shook my head and said no, and then he said this.
“Pity, I had a cigarette with me earlier, but it fell out of my pocket it seems. It’s a pity, isn’t it? When we know we had something and we simply don’t anymore?”
“I guess?”. I was really freaking out at this point, but then he bought his second hand forward very dramatically, as if he peered into my mind. It was empty. As I blinked, he had his back towards me and started walking away. He disappeared into the darkness close to the periphery of the tree.
I’m gonna be honest, I was really high. Like, I thought I hallucinated most of that interaction and I convinced my girlfriend that it was just a freak encounter. After all, it was after midnight, and we were in a really sketchy part of town.
The bus rolled in about 10 minutes later. We got in and went back to college and forgot about encounter, apart from really enthusiastically narrating it to our friends the next day and telling them how freaky it was.
I was not ready for what was about to come.
The first pair fell off when I was attending my literature class. When I woke up two days after the incident I felt a sharp pain in my lower gum. And can we take a second to talk about how fucking annoying gum pain is? Its like a scab you can never itch, and touching or fucking with it with your tongue only makes it worse. It was that, but just a hundredfold worse. It was so bad that I thought I couldn’t get out of bed, but I didn’t have the balls to tell my girlfriend that I was skipping class because of gum pain. So I got up and popped some painkillers and headed to class. Royally bad idea.
Halfway through the class, my gum started to sting and burn, as if someone was holding a matchstick right on it. My professor was talking about some form of writing or something and I could not give two shits about it because all I wanted was some pliers to rip both of my lower incisors out.
“Vik, Vik, are you okay? Your lip. . .” my friend Reb started to enquire. I excused myself and ran out to the washroom. For some reason I had a tick that I couldn’t explain this to people.
I rushed to the washroom and I saw that my lower lip was the size of an orange slice. It was fucking gigantic and it freaked me the fuck out. I texted my girlfriend and told her that I was going to the dentist and sent her a photo of myself for an explanation.
As I walked to my car to back it out of the parking lot, it just suddenly stopped. And I mean, it all went away. The taste of blood from my mouth, the monstrous stench of decay from my mouth, the feeling of my lip being a fucking fruit slice, just whoosh. I immediately pulled my phone out to look at myself and I immediately started to choke. And I’m talking asphyxiation/death inducing choking. I literally dropped all my shit, including my phone, bag and just curled up and started coughing on the concrete floor. After about five minutes of this bloody coughing fit, I spit something out.
Two teeth. From my lower jaw. My bottom incisors.
I went to the dentist straight after this. They ran scans after scans. X-rays of a million different varieties. They have put me on a metric fuckton of different experimental treatments. Started new research based on my condition. And they have no answers. They told me its not just that my teeth fell off, its as if they were never there. Simply didn’t exist. Not only that, my gums seem as if they have always been dormant and never displayed any sign of growth at all. No nerve endings or anything.
They also kept me in observation for several weeks, just to catch it on tape I guess. But it has never happened in front of anyone, and honestly, I have no idea what makes it happen. It seems like if I step out of society for even a moment, and have no immediate way to get help it starts happening. I am paranoid and afraid of being alone. My girlfriend stayed with me for as long as she could, but I’ve had to return home because my mom is really sick and there’s only so long I can stay at the hospital. I’ve had to return home to pickup insurance papers and some other important shit, and have lost five more of my teeth this way. I take a toothbrush with me everywhere, and brush every time I have a chance to. I like to think it helps, but I know that it doesn’t. It can’t.
The process of the teeth falling off takes very little time now, and happens in as little as an hour and hurts a million times more. It has happened seven times now, including the first time. Everytime it happens I feel like I am being punished in some divine manner. Like I committed some sin too great to redeem myself of. Like I bit into the divine apple and the sin has erupted into decay and constant rot for my body. It is always preceded by the same things. My lips swelling up to be comically large, the smell of death and decay from my mouth and insurmountable blood and pain right as it falls out. I am afraid I am haunted.
I knew this is all happening because of that homeless, smelly fuck. I have no explanations for why I feel this way, but I just feel it. I feel it in my bones and I feel it in my gums. I went back to the bus stop close to midnight yesterday to look for him and to ask for explanations. Just to know what the actual fuck he did to me. I did not find him. But there’s something I did find exactly where he stood, right next to the Banyan tree.
A single cigarette. A Marlboro Red. The cigarettes I had in my pocket.