Today was inevitable; it had to be done.
Something I had postponed twice, lied about once, and considered moving cities to avoid. Something terrifying.
The dentist.
At 4:10 p.m., I was sitting in the waiting room pretending to read an article about how the world was supposedly heading toward World War III while a dental drill screamed behind a closed door. I had opened the article twelve minutes earlier and I was still on the first paragraph.
Across from me sat a little boy with a badly behaved mop of dark curls, a bright blue t-shirt with a dinosaur stretched across the front, and tiny gray sweatpants that kept riding up every time he swung his legs.
He looked suspiciously relaxed like someone who had either never been to a dentist before or had already accepted death.
His mother kept saying, “See? It doesn’t hurt.”
She had been saying it for ten minutes, which convinced me that it almost certainly did.
Every few seconds, the boy looked at me and smiled, completely unbothered.
I hated him immediately.
The receptionist sat behind a white desk cluttered with appointment cards, pens tied to strings, and one sad plastic plant that looked like it had given up on life years ago.
She had a particular voice for patients: Calm, soft, almost maternal.
“Don’t worry, it’ll be very quick,” she said to everyone, which felt statistically impossible.
I found myself wondering whether she spoke like this outside the clinic too. Whether she used the same soothing voice when arguing with her husband, calling her mother, or telling someone they had forgotten to take the trash out.
Maybe she had been doing this job for so long that calmness had permanently entered her bloodstream. Or maybe, at exactly 5 p.m., she went home and started yelling like the rest of us.
At 4:18, I started bargaining with God, nothing dramatic, just small negotiations.
If this tooth is fine, I will floss every night.
If there is no root canal, I will become a better person.
If the dentist says, “Everything looks great,” I might even call all my family back.
At 4:27, another woman entered the waiting room looking far too composed for someone voluntarily entering the dentist’s office.
She wore dark sunglasses indoors, a crisp white shirt, and carried a structured handbag tucked neatly under one arm. Not a strand of hair seemed to have moved out of place.
She removed her sunglasses, sat two chairs away from me, crossed one leg over the other, and started scrolling through her phone as if there wasn’t a drill screaming somewhere behind the wall.
Then she made a call.
“Yes, I’m at the dentist.”
Pause.
“No, for the whitening.”
Of course.
There are two kinds of people at the dentist: People fighting for survival, like me, and people casually upgrading the shade of their teeth.
At 4:31, the receptionist looked toward me and I quickly shifted my eyes toward my phone.
“Adnan?”
Everyone looked up. The little boy, his mother, and the sunglasses woman.
Even the receptionist looked at me as if she just announced the next contestant.
The assistant led me down a hallway that smelled aggressively clean, which was somehow worse than if it had smelled suspicious.
Water suction.
Metal clinking.
Muted conversation.
One very suspicious “open wider.”
So many sounds.
By the time I reached the chair, I had already diagnosed myself with six conditions.
The dentist walked in wearing gloves and looking way too relaxed for someone who was about to ruin my afternoon.
“How are you?”
“Good.”
A lie.
“Any pain?”
“No.”
Another lie.
“Any sensitivity?”
“Sometimes.”
Finally, honesty.
He leaned the chair back as I stared at the ceiling.
There was a poster above me of a beach somewhere tropical.
This was intentional. This is a psychological experiment.
“Open.”
Okay.
“Wider.”
Of course.
Dentists are the only people who ask you questions while both their hands are inside your mouth.
“So what do you do for work?”
“Ahhh.”
“Intersting.”
It wasn’t.
At one point, he made a small sound and I immediately saw my financial future collapse.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Nothing.
There is no more dangerous word in medicine than “nothing.”
“Well, you have one small cavity.”
One. small. Cavity.
I had spent three days imagining surgery, divided my savings, and prepared myself to receive devastating news for ONE cavity.
“We can fill it next week.”
The fear had simply been rescheduled.
When I walked back into the waiting room, the little boy was still there.
He looked at me carefully.
“Did it hurt?”
His mother immediately turned toward me.
This felt important as I looked at him then at his mother, then back at him.
“Not at all,” I said.
His mother smiled.
I sat down to book my next appointment and realized I had officially joined the conspiracy.
