The Dentist, Scrambled Eggs and a Bad Nineties Song
Tuesday morning, my alarm woke me up from a dream. One moment, I’m stumbling around a forest populated by unseen alligators and suspicious gnomes looking for my kids, starting to panic; the next, Lights by Ellie Goulding is blaring too loudly from my phone on the bedside table, and I’m struggling to free myself from sheets and roll out of bed. I started the day feeling…off.
Maybe it was because I had to go to the dentist to get a crown. I have anxiety about going to the dentist, well-founded on past experience. I once leaped out of the chair, wrenching the dentist’s hand from my mouth in a reptilian response to the searing pain that had suddenly zapped up my nerve from the molar on which he was drilling. I could just make out his dubious expression through my watery eyes as he asked,
“Are you sure what you feel is pain? And not just pressure?”
Hmmm, not sure, asshole. Let me check in with my biological nervous system and see if there was possibly an error — a memo that got misread. Perhaps the synapse that screamed, Ohmygod, it’s coming from inside the house! Getthefuckout! at my muscles just mistook a raucous party for searing, tortuous pain and imminent threat. It was a very Gas Lighting 101 experience.
My current dentist is awesome and sensitive. She gives me extra numbing stuff and extra time for my nerves to go to sleep. The needles she always apologizes for are nothing compared to having a cavity drilled while you can still feel it. I will take 18 of them over that naked, drilled nerve zap any day.
I still have not completely resolved the traumatic dental experiences from my 20s, though.
So, I wrote in my journal that morning, trying to work through the lizard brain fear I had of the dentist. I got the kids off to school. Mostly they do that themselves these days, but I’m around to annoy them by asking, “How do you feel today?” and to say, “I love you; have a good day,” so they can mutter something back that I sometimes interpret as “you too,” or may be nothing more than grunts.
Then, I am alone in the house, making myself eggs because we’re out of yogurt, and for some reason, I rarely take the time to actually cook myself a breakfast, even though it takes about three minutes longer than preparing yogurt or cereal.
There’s a song in my head. No idea where it came from:
Is it true it’s always happy hour here?
If it is, I’d like to stay awhile.
As cliché as it may sound,
I’d like to raise another round,
And if your bottle’s empty, help yourself to mine.
Thank you for your time.
And here’s to lies.
I crack one egg over the spinach and coconut oil already simmering on the stove. I crack the second egg, and it spills down the outside of the pan under the gas burner, half-cooking and congealing, making the kind of gloopy, sticky mess only raw egg or cooked oatmeal is capable of achieving.
Shit.
I turn off the heat, remove the grate and begin spooning the gelatinous yolk and white back into the pan. I am trying to save the egg, despite the further mess I’m creating by stringing the clear liquid, which reminds me of aqueous humor from an eyeball in biology dissection class, across the whole countertop. I can hear my dad in my head saying, This is good conservation; it’s a perfectly good egg. I can hear Jason, too: Just get another egg. They’re not that expensive!
They are both right, and that is beside the point.
I make a mess getting this egg back into the pan because I choose to. Because there are only two eggs left and I want whoever makes eggs next not to be stuck with an awkward one egg — whether it’s me or someone else. My choice, my reasons.
Barkeep, we need to go round again.
One for me and whatshisname my new best friend
So deal me in,
And I’ll pick my cards up off the floor
I’ll see your lucky coin
And raise a pack of lies…
I haven’t seen my girl for fifteen thousand miles.
I continue scrambling eggs and dig around in my brain for the name of the band:
The Refreshments. I had their album in the 90s; it wasn’t terribly popular. They had some radio song that prompted me to buy it — not the one that’s in my head right now. Fuck it, I’m going to listen to that song.
So I sit at the bar in my kitchen with my slightly diminished eggs and coffee right next to Alexa, volume low so as not to wake Jason who is slumbering right above me in our bedroom, and ask her to play The Refreshments. I then “next” her through mildly obnoxious punk-inspired songs until I find the one. Turns out it’s called Mekong. Never would have guessed.
Jason would hate this song, I think. It’s not a masterpiece; it’s not poetry. It’s mediocre overall. But why did it come to me? What did I ever like about this song in the first place?
It’s about loneliness.
The lyrics, the uplifting beat with the melancholy not far beneath the surface speaks of lying to yourself — you’re not lonely because you’re in a crowded bar with whatshisname, your new best friend. That speaks to me. I find both the concept and story of it beautifully painful.
I felt a little of that poetic loneliness, prepping for my dentist appointment by myself that morning. I told Gage about it before he left for school. I mentioned I was nervous, but mostly because I’m always trying to model the expression of feelings. He was unmoved.
I had forgotten to tell Jason about the appointment the night before. Just like I forgot to talk about my hysterectomy several months ago. And at 10:30 the night before, when it occurred to me to mention it, I was getting ready for bed and too tired to deal with difficult feelings.
And so I was lonely that morning:
Barkeep, another Mekong, please.
Yes, of course, you can keep the change.
A new glass here for this new friend of mine;
Forgive me, I forgot your name.
Lonely is part of life.
Lonely can be beautiful, especially if you don’t lie to yourself about it. I have people; I chose a little bit of lonely that morning. In lonely, you can do whatever you want. That’s the upside.
You can scrape your botched eggs off the stove burner, and no one tells you it’s absurd — no one approves or disapproves. You can listen to your mediocre song from a forgotten 90s band that no one ever liked that much in the first place. You can sit in front of your computer and write about your mundane-ass morning and your, in the grand scheme of things, unremarkable dental appointment like it’s the most significant moment in the past millennium.
Lonely isn’t always bad. Lonely can be a beautiful and profound experience of freedom, especially if you’ve chosen it. Especially if you have people to go back to.
Acknowledgments
Have you ever read a newsletter with an Acknowledgments section? Well, look no further! (I know you have waited your entire life for this moment).
While angsty feelings this past Tuesday sparked me to sit down and write about loneliness, by way of dental anxiety and raw eggs, something Jason said planted the seed. After returning from a solo trip to spend some much-needed time by himself, he said he felt a little lonely while he was there; he missed us. But it was something he’d needed. He felt better, having had the opportunity to be lonely for a bit.*
Maybe this is what Shakespeare/Romeo meant by, “Parting is such sweet sorrow…” Loneliness as the absence of companionship but also freedom and relief from burden — a double-edged petard?** What do you think? Has loneliness ever taken on a sweetness for you?
*Non-Official Disclaimer: I’m paraphrasing Jason from my terribly unreliable memory. If you run into him at Randalls and mention this profoundness to him, he may deny it completely.
**I googled it and my Hamlet reference, which I thought was so clever, is ruined by the fact that a petard is a bomb and not a sword as I thought. Instead of rewriting it, I did the lazy thing and caveated it here.