Numbing

​​​The dentist asks me to turn my face toward her, the way my partner does in bed. My wet lips part, mouth ready. She gently swabs a numbing gel inside my cheek to cushion even the sting of anesthetic. This is what she practices, the elimination of feeling. She inserts the syringe. The needle pinches and my left hand flickers, nerves tense, alert to any whisper of pain. But, just as fast, deadening sets in. She loads up a second syringe. She understands I can’t tolerate hurt, even when I’ve brought it on myself.  

My phone buzzes in my lap; an emoji heart text from my partner appears. He takes good care of me. He cooks me butternut squash with thyme. He runs his thumb along the arch of my foot when I’ve had a long day. He wants to become my husband.  

The right corner of my mouth tingles, a feeling that spreads to the fat of my lower lip, along the edge of my tongue, and across my outer cheek. “Do you sense anything?” the dentist asks, pricking at my gums with her tiny metal sickle. I shake my head no, but honestly, I’m never sure what I feel.   

“Can I call you my wife?” my partner asked as he diced the squash into tidy cubes. Wife is rooted in an ancient word for woman, and, further back, pudenda, while husband originates from words for master and steward of the house. This age-old imbalance between sex and control, buried in our language, sends a trickle of panic through me, even though it’s been more than a decade since my first marriage shattered and I swore never again.  

My partner and I had lived together six months when he first erupted in anger. I don’t know what I said to trigger the flash, something trivial to me, a misplaced word that wounded him. That night I clung to my edge of the mattress while his body, stiff with fury, radiated heat. In the morning, I pulled out an overnight bag, ready to leave. “But we’re just having a fight,” he said. The friction of an argument felt ominous. I stayed, but am I wrong to want only the sweetness?   

The drilling begins, a calamity in my mouth, the loud mosquito whine, the fine confusion of mist. The dentist bores into my cavity, digging out the rot. My lower back arches, and my hands clutch the armrests, ready to flee. But I feel nothing. The dentist switches to a bigger drill, frying the outer casing. There is the smell of burning. I hear the demolition, far away, as if it were happening to someone else, my own sensations on mute.  

The dentist holds up a mirror to show me the aftermath of my carelessness before she covers the hole. The blight ran deep. Even enamel, harder than our bones, cannot withstand my anxious grinding or my family’s habit, running back generations, of sucking hard candies and then cracking them. More decay is inevitable, the dentist says through her mask, unless you change. 

My mouth and tongue have grown stupid with numbness; they can’t coordinate to form words. But if I could speak, I would tell her that I will keep sucking the hard candies and resting my head against my partner’s warm back at night and forgetting which words hurt him and running from a raised voice and the menace of commitment. And I would ask her, until I accept the certainty of pain and let myself feel it, how can I ever hope to change? 

Button lives in New England among beehives with her life partner. Her work has found homes in The New York Times, Longreads, HuffPost, Hippocampus Magazine, and others. She won the Annie Dillard Award in Nonfiction from Bellingham Review and was named finalist for the Rumpus Prize and the Iowa Review Award. Her website is lindabuttonworks.com, and although she is hopeless at Substack, she tries anyway.  

This essay is a Short Reads original.