My Teeth

By Pedro Pablo Morejon

HAVANA TIMES – It’s not very recurrent, like appearing naked in the middle of a crowd or being pursued by a terrible entity that gives me no respite, but another of my dreams that has sometimes terrified me consists of suddenly losing or breaking my teeth.

The sensation that follows is distressing, a dream so vivid that it’s impossible to distinguish it from reality until I wake up and gradually regain lucidity and above all the relief of confirming that my teeth remain there, firmly within the oral cavity.

The thing is, this has been one of my biggest concerns for most of my life. I had the misfortune of having poor genetics for teeth. Since I was ten years old, I began to notice that my molars were filling up with cavities, then my teeth.

My mother took me to the dentist and I had to spend more than a month fixing everything, however, in adolescence, the fillings fell out due to the poor quality of the material.

There’s a memory that never fades from my mind, in high school, a boy from 9th grade, older than me and very popular among the girls, said to me in front of some: “You have those teeth that look like the gnawed bread from “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes.”

I distanced myself from them, with my self-esteem shattered and the incapacity and ignorance typical of a teenager to manage this kind of situations. A few months later, I managed to fix my teeth again and since then I have been living with them as the Achilles’ heel of my body.

I’m not usually pessimistic, but the reality is that I struggle to obtain things that have value for me, and if I do get them, it’s through efforts and sacrifices. Dreams don’t come true for me, but nightmares sometimes do, at least now, albeit on a small scale.

I woke up one of these mornings and when I went to shave, I discovered that I had lost a piece of filling on a tooth, more than half. A feeling of bitterness and anguish ran through my whole body, and the expression on my face turned gray.

A dentist’s office.

Since I’m a stoic type, I decided to calm down and try to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Gradually, I regained energy, called a close friend who is a dentist, and everything was fine, the only problem was that there was no filling material left. “Until yesterday, I had a little left that a client had given me, but I had to use it on another, maybe something will come in for me next week, don’t despair,” she said.

I started to try and find out where to get it. That’s how things are, you have to pray to God, the universe, or whatever exists beyond this dimension not to “fall” into a health problem. A friend told me that he had to pay thousands of pesos for antibiotics for his father. Like that, a thousand cases that are already everyday. In the end, I found someone who would fix it for $500 pesos (just under 2 USD). I was skeptical, but it was someone known by another acquaintance, and I calmed down a bit. I had to trust that the material was good and my friend confirmed it was, so I was able to solve the problem with the tooth.

Read more from Pedro Pablo Morejon’s diary here on Havana Times.

Pedro Morejón

I am a man who fights for his goals, who assumes the consequences of his actions, who does not stop at obstacles. I could say that adversity has always been an inseparable companion, I have never had anything easy, but in some sense, it has benefited my character. I value what is in disuse, such as honesty, justice, honor. For a long time, I was tied to ideas and false paradigms that suffocated me, but little by little I managed to free myself and grow by myself. Today I am the one who dictates my morale, and I defend my freedom against wind and tide. I also build that freedom by writing, because being a writer defines me.