Text — Reflections on My Retainer
I.
I was given a menu of options for retainer customization. Zebra stripes, glittery, sport team icons. He told me I could submit a picture, too. “It’ll take a few weeks extra, but you can put any picture you want on it,” he said. I thought about bringing in a picture of Sophie. But what are the ethics of having a recreation of your dog in your mouth?
In the end, I ended up going with glow-in-the-dark and billiards. I rarely play pool.
II.
In my senior year, my schedule involved staying at my Mom’s for three days a week and my Dad’s for the other three days, switching the extra day in the week every week. Sometimes I think God purposely made weeks uneven just to make things awkward.
Every Wednesday, I’d drive from my Dad’s in the morning to my Mom’s after school. Normally, my Volvo, Otto, would be stuffed with homework, books I needed, clothes from odd laundry exchanges, mail or files between my two parents, contact solution, you name it.
One day, my lime green retainer went missing. I checked cabinets and behind the toilet (I mean, there aren’t many places where you can lose dental ware). It was winter when I eventually found it—two weeks after a huge snowstorm.
I exited Otto some night after seeing a movie with friends. As usual, I parked in the middle of the length of the driveway on the right side near the grass. Rochester—some weather apocalypse—was as dark and cold as ever.
It was when I dropped my keys that I saw something seemingly nuclear. After all, it was glowing. And there I found it, frozen in a dirty snowball to the side of my car, mixed with the muck and mud.
I think I washed it.
III.
At college, I endured a space crisis. Though my cement dorm room had been decorated and made homey, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was living in a dirtier, whiter form of a jail cell.
I eventually decided to lift my bed up to its maximize height and turn the burrow below the bed into a Christmas-light-lit cove of blankets and a beanbag.
When my retainer disappeared during the second semester of my freshman year, I looked explicitly in this area, thinking it obvious that my retainer would fall from my mouth to the spot below it. Well how else would I lose it? Forceful removal? That’s unfortunate and non-consensual. I’d rather not think that way.
It was a few months later when my friend Emma came to visit. As she snuggled in my sleeping bag below me, we said a few words before sleeping. I mentioned the story of my missing retainer as a passing joke—that it was gone and nowhere to be found. Again.
At morning, she woke me.
“I found your retainer,” she whispered, pulling it out from the bag in all its atomic green glory.
The best part is that sleeping bag had been slept in by four people and had traveled to three different states since the loss of my retainer inside of it.
IX.
Now, my retainer has become a symbol of order. It’s odd to think that way, especially for something as neon as it that gets shoved into my mouth and put back into its case as soon as I get up. Sometimes my teeth hurt when I wake, and when I go back to bed I ask myself if I should wear it or not.
But without it, I feel a little chaotic. Like the miniscule movement of my teeth in the course of six hours would change the greater organization of my life.
Let’s just hope I don’t lose it again.
