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I once fell off the swings and busted the landing so hard that when I came up, my face was all smeared with blood. I had broken a front tooth. It grew back late since it left earlier than it was supposed to. Y’know, baby teeth process n’ all that…
Well, that adult tooth got chipped in a play fight accident a couple years afterwards. I kneed myself so hard in the face trying to get some little kid, that I lifted up too quick and tore up my lip, breaking a piece of my tooth off. When I sat up, I got laughed at, ‘cause I hadn’t even realized anything was missing.
I thought I took it like a real champ. Knee to the face, that’s gotta hurt. But apparently I looked so dang silly for messing up so bad that I ended up doing more damage to myself than I did to the other kid.
With the first tooth incident, I was cleaned up real easy. They told me I was brave for not being terrified of a little bit of blood, for not being scared at all when I saw pieces of my own tooth out in the mulch.
I mean, I got scolded too. It wasn't all praises and sunshine. People were telling me I should'a been more careful. I should've been easier on myself. I shouldn't have been messing around… I can see where they were coming from. But I wasn’t as worried about it when I knew it’d grow back. Besides, being a Curtis isn’t about being easy or careful. I couldn’t do either of those, even if I tried.
It was the second one that stressed me out. A chip in your tooth isn’t gonna just grow back like a full tooth. I knew I was gonna be stuck with it for life. It was fine, sure. But I felt pretty dorky for a while there.
People say my personality is something that makes up for the little chip in my grin. A lotta folks find it real easy to talk to me. They like to tell me that I brighten their day. I’m glad I do. I wanna be like that for people. Makes it nicer for myself to know people like seeing this piece-missing-smile everyday. Honestly, I’d say everyone is lucky I don’t have a perfect smile. If I had dimples, I’d be a real menace with showing that off all the time with the rest.
I didn’t ever pay much attention to my mouth aside from that. I got too busy staring at the rest of my face that I actually liked staring at. Like how my face wrinkles when I move it. How my eyes get small, how my nose scrunches. You’re only ever really in focus with your own eyes and not your mouth when you look in a mirror.
It's just not as pretty to stare at my mouth when you get up close and personal to see bitten lips and sugar-sticky, stained teeth.
People like kissing me. I know that’s gross to say, but it’s kinda true. One of my first ever girlfriends said I always tasted like chocolate. She wasn’t much familiar with my actual diet, so I had to explain to her that it was because I barely ate anything but chocolate. She became less of a fan of it after that. Said it sounded unhealthy. And it is. But I wasn’t exactly gonna change anything about that, and at some point we broke off.
I dunno if it was the chocolate part specifically that was why she left. I think she just got bored. I didn’t realize that I had gotten bored too until she left, so I really didn’t blame her.
Usually, to keep myself from gettin’ bored, I like to make up stories in my head. Not like the stories that my brothers read, but more of like daydreams of later in life. The evil part about that though is my mind always wanders to love with strangers. If someone stared at me for even a moment across a room, I’d look back at them and end up making a full love story of 2 kids and a house out in the country before they could even blink to look away. I’m crazy like that.
Pony calls me some kind of a hopeless romantic. I hate to say that he might be right. Being ‘hopeless’ sounds a bit dramatic to me, but it’s even worse that it's probably the most accurate definition for it.
Loving a girl comes easy to me. Loving well of anyone is easy for me. When someone catches my heart the right way, I start falling. I’d chip another tooth because something faulty goes off and sends me flailing. I just get lucky of being caught—by myself, or by someone new.
One girl caught me.
I fell real deep in love. So deep, it hurt to think about her. Speaking about her all the time, daydreaming all kinds of stuff about where I’d be with her in the future. She was my world for a whole year and a half. We had known each other for way longer, but that year she must’ve been the only thing I could think of.
She made my smile feel pretty, making sure to put her thumbs at each corner of my lips and press down just a little to keep my lips from giving to close my mouth outta embarrassment of doing it too much. She made sure I was careful; practically holding me up with her hands on my chin to make sure I never hit the ground.
She gave me a look back so full of love I think I might've died and came back to life right on the spot. I couldn’t ever stop smiling for her.
Even with a chipped tooth, she liked my smile. Even with cake wedged deep into my molars, she kissed me.
Glory, if I had known how much of a fool I was gonna end up, I would've never let myself catch even a glimpse of her face.
She was gone before I knew it. Fluttered right past me in a blink, and all she could leave me was a letter.
I was embarrassed. I felt so damn foolish for letting myself trip like that. I thought she'd tricked me. I convinced myself she did because everyone else was convincing me too. I told myself that she didn't want nothing to do with me to begin with, and was just using me. I hate that people agreed.
I didn’t wanna think of her that way. I know it can be a lot of the truth, but all I could do was worry that I was the problem. That I was somehow too much and not enough all at once.
I kept thinking that I should’ve paid more attention to her, but how could I when I spent more time thinking about her than anything else? All I would do after school was go out with her when she gave me the chance. It just didn’t dig right in my mind what must’ve happened without me noticing. Not until after I started hearing this, that, and some other stuff.
I blocked all that out.
I think she liked me at first. I mean, I really thought about it. You can't just love someone and last a year and a half with them before you finally decide the game's over. A year is too much dedication.
I ended up settling on that I was too full of myself and how she made me feel that I didn’t even think about how I made her feel. I felt real stupid suddenly. I had to have just been doing too much. Or maybe less than I thought I had been.
I wanted to try and find her. I wanted to grab her by the hands and apologize. I would look at her, look at her n’ really say “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being such a beggar. Love doesn’t come cheap where I’m from. I’m sorry.”
Whatever it was—maybe she was bored, or sick of me—I knew I must have been some part of the problem. I knew it for a fact. The world was yelling at me, but I couldn’t listen. I just couldn’t.
I told myself after that to not to love so hard anymore. I had to stop being hopeless. Stop being such a dreamer.
But it turns out I could barely stand giving that a chance, because it’s like the moment I swore to it the universe decided it’d just try to take things quicker away from me. There is so much love in the world that I wanna get involved in, n’ yet I think everything was just telling me to say goodbye to it.
My friends blew out like lights faster than I could catch my hands around them. My family nearly tore itself up and apart every other day, and every other night. It felt like I was being punished for something long-term, all for a thing I didn’t even remember doing. I thought, in a real humorous way of that, I must’a been framed.
I really thought about just letting everything go all at once ‘cause of that. I was like, “Well, if it’s gonna be this difficult to love, maybe I shouldn’t at all for a while” thinking that things would ease up at some point or something.
I made myself a real mess thinking like that. My friends caught on. Their girls caught on. Hell, of course my brothers caught on. My best friend nearly knocked my head in because he was tired of seeing me spiraling. I was tryin’ to keep myself safe from heartbreak, and I think I nearly gave everyone else one. I just…
I didn’t wanna do it anymore. I didn’t want the worry of losing something. I didn’t wanna think about any negatives. I wanted a real big, plastic sheet put over my world for protection so no evil could reach it. Some kind of fake happiness to give me at least a lick of sanity before I got back out there.
I missed feeling something.
Obviously, giving up all at once isn’t the best decision to make. But when you’re real jumpy like I am, real fidgety at the thought of maybes and possibilities creeping out at you, what would you expect me to do? Sit there and act like nothing was going on?
You wonder what you’re really allowed to love without it getting snatched without you noticing.
I convinced myself real bad of a lot of stuff I “didn’t deserve.” I stressed some people out real bad in the process. I’m probably still stressing people out. I know for sure I stress myself out.
I still don’t know if I’m allowed to love anymore. I’m just scared shitless thinking about it.