There's No Place Like Home

"Have I answered your questions?" He inquired, seemingly searching my face for clues. "Does it make sense to you, what I believe to be the cause of your tooth pain?" I nodded a yes and left the dentist chair that day with more questions than answers. Giving up recent habit of chewing gum would be easy. Avoiding a root canal, mind strumming acapella all the way to work. Am I clenching that tight, gripping life unaware of the transaction taking place, the unconscious gritting through days and nights? News that blared hard through the week, back that pained red-hot. I stood in line at Walgreen's, where another Kardashian commandeered the magazine rack. I am undone! And like a  paratrooper landing on a deserted island, I shot up an SOS prayer. A distress signal for the lost. Please unfurl these fists, this jaw that clings tight when my heart whispers let go. Please help the wounded and hurting this week, please find the guilty and let there be peace. I moved lower jaw in circular motion, an effort to break loose indiscernible tension. A quote brushed my mind and I let it settle, like a rippling creek it bathed the stony part of me that wants to give up. Hubert Van Zeller once wrote: "The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God." Maybe that is what causes teeth to grind, in the night when all is dark and stars are mapping a highway of iridescent light. A homesickness that pings distress when life is hard and peace appears farfetched. For now, I declined my dentist's offer for a tooth guard. Is there another way? A foolproof method to loosen the grip? And then I am eight-years-old perched in front of black-and-white television watching Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz . She clicks those famous red heels together, uttering words that is cure to all ills and fears, a soothing balm for all pain and uncertainty, and surely she did not know the visceral truth uttered in those forever lines: "There's no place like home. There's no place like home." A compass for the lost and a constant guard against grinding teeth. A dusting of peace sprinkled across restless soul. There's no place like home.