You ask what it feels like as you press your finger into my chin as hard as you can. I tell you what I tell everyone else.

“Like there’s a giant pile of blankets covering my chin and you’re poking the top of the pile.”

“Huh.”

I wonder if you’re the only one who doesn’t understand this description I’ve worked on for months, or if everyone else has been lying to me. So I tell you I can feel the pressure. It just feels very far away.

“Close your eyes.”

So I do, opening them only when I feel your breath in my mouth, soft, wet, colored with Listerine and beer.

“Are you biting it?”

You nod, and I feel my lower lip wiggling in the distance. Like it’s someone else’s lip. Someone else’s teeth. You release.

“You can’t feel that at all?”

But I do.

I feel the force of what I know is there. I feel the answer to the question swimming in the back of my throat. I feel you wanting me to feel it. Wanting to know what it felt like before. I just can’t feel the crook of your teeth pressing into my skin. It’s like someone softened the edges. Like they declawed the cat. Or defanged the snake, really, and he’s chomped on my lip, but before he got too close they shot me up with novocaine so I wouldn’t feel his scales. It’s like I’m asleep and someone’s tugging at my lower lip with silicone kitchen tongs. Like the nerve endings are taking a nap too and we’ll all wake up and have a laugh. Like someone else is feeling what I’m not because the feeling has to go somewhere – it just does. Like I probably would have done things differently if I knew I’d only ever feel half of your mouth on mine. Like the doctors were lying when they said the feeling would come back eventually. Like all the little electrical pulses I feel from time to time are getting fewer and farther between. Like I know what it felt like before, so maybe I’m estimating whatever feeling I’m feeling now,

so I just say, “Not really,”

but I don’t think I am.