How I Died Last Time

…and some ways it manifests now.

“Why do you talk like that?”

The question took me by surprise & I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“With your jaw clenched,” he said.

He held a muffin from craft services in one hand and gestured toward his own jaw with his other. “You barely open your mouth.”

Nonplussed, I told him all I knew.

“It’s always been like that, my jaw,” I answered him. Crew members turned to look as I said, “I can only open it this wide.”

To demonstrate, I opened my mouth as wide as I could and struggled to insert my two left forefingers, pointed like the barrel of a gun between my teeth.

“May I?” he’d set the muffin down and his own fingers, also pointed like the barrel of a gun, were poised several inches from my face.

Of course I acquiesced.

We were filming a cooking show with a celebrity chef, on location in a Korean grocery store.

The man asking to put his fingers in my mouth was a producer. I was just a production assistant — a glorified day laborer. There were people around, and I didn’t want to embarrass him. That’s why I opened my mouth for him when he asked me to.

Were he to ask me today, 13 years later, why I talk with my jaw clenched, I’d answer more completely because today I know more. Today I’m more myself than I was then.

I would tell him that it was the same reason that I was born with my head twisted to one side. That in addition to what presents as a peculiarity of speech, my neck and jaw have hurt most my life.

I would tell him it was because of how I died last time.

“We were running,” I would tell him, “my sisters, my cousins, and I, through the forest, away from the men who had killed our men. Our old people had fallen behind, there was nothing we could do but run. So we kept running. We knew that they would kill whoever of us they could, and so we ran. Some of us carried babies and some had small children. I didn’t.

So I slowed down. I knew it was inevitable.