It's the first bracingly cold day of winter, for my money. I run a bit warmer than most people, due to the energy-sucking effects of my personality. I absorb all the heat in a room. But today got the better of me, I had to break out the jacket with an actual lining.

One of the little things I remember about my first boyfriend, J, is that his teeth would chatter, almost comically so, like in a cartoon. What a perfect bite he had, he'd have made a great cannibal. When I had braces I was incorrigible, it was hell for them to get me to wear my retainer, and I never wore the rubber bands and nighttime headgear to correct my misaligned bite. Do they still even use the rubber band method? It seemed so medieval to me. The first day I wore them I opened my mouth in front of the mirror and saw all that stretching rubber anchored to these terrible hooks inside my mouth and said forget it. My mouth felt like some kind of Rube Goldberg device, or maybe a torture chamber used to extract sham confessions from political prisoners. Tiny ones.

So for that reason my lower jaw and my upper jaw don't meet in any kind of natural place, there's a kind of floating aspect. I can bring them together in any number of places, none of which feels quite like home. This lack of physical integration is nicely emblematic of a divided personality, or so I tell myself instead of berating myself for not wearing the damn rubber bands. Of course now I'd consider the headgear to be erotically suggestive and would eagerly don it.