Just beyond the Milky Way...

 This is a picture of half of a mouth guard that I’m using to help with terrible arthritis in my left jaw. I didn’t even think of arthritis existing in one’s jaw, but it makes sense as a joint, even if it hasn’t had trauma - just from incorrect overuse (overbite), It got so painful that I could barely chew and had to go see a specialist; a specialist usually not covered by insurance, people who are specialists in a field that is considered secondary, like your eyes. A stupid amount of money later, here I am with one of three pieces that are doing nothing but convincing my jaw that all my teeth actually meet. (What is this witchcraft and who are these witches?)

However, instead of going do a rabbit hole of health care in America, aging, and how painfully long I went before I sought help with my jaw, I’m going to tell you a story.

A week or so ago, I had a dream that we were in Nairobi, Kenya flying to the Philippines. My friend Anne had recently retired and become a pilot in her second career, and we were on her flight. We were taxiing through the market in Nairobi (in a giant aircraft! somehow missing all the stalls and vendors!) to get to the runway and I stared out the window, getting lost in thought and started thinking about something else. And suddenly, the plane took off, leaving my soul in Nairobi. I came to realize that I was no longer connected to my body and freaked out. How was I going to reconnect with my body? I didn’t have my wallet, passport, or even my phone. How would my soul get through costumes? The plane landed in Manila and Lara called my friend Helen, who was in Nairobi, to talk to my soul. She was like, “Your lifeless body is here.” And I was like, I know WHAT DO I DO?! How do I get reconnected?!

There is precedence for this logic. When I was younger, middle school and early high school, I would go to bed at night and leave my body behind. I would be standing above my bed and see myself sleeping and then zoom into the night sky. I would fly above Cleveland, then Ohio, the US, leaving the northern hemisphere and the protective magical layers of our atmosphere. I would zoom past the moon, past the planets and their many dancing moons to the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, onto the edge of the universe. And there I would meet some of the patriarchs of mostly Western societies as dictated to young women from Ohio in history classes. Giants made of stars were Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, (Christian) God, Confucius, Buddha, and maybe a few other interchangeable “thinkers” that were infrequent visitors that I had recently learned about in art class like Da Vinci or a rando like Nietzsche or Kant. I would be deep in conversations with them all when I would suddenly remember that my alarm would be going off any minute and I had to get back to my body in my bed or my soul would be left out here in the galaxy, among the stars. My soul would be lost; my body would move on without me.

I would say goodbye, and zoom back, heart racing, as fast as I could possibly go (obviously faster than the speed of light), from the edge of the Universe, through the Milky Way galaxy, past the planets and their moons, through the layers of the Earth’s protective atmosphere, to North America, America, Ohio, Cleveland, my community, my house, my bed. The alarm would go off and I would be relieved to be back in my body, in my bed, not lost to the stars.

I did this all the time.

Though that’s not why I grind my teeth at night.