March 8, 2005

About a month ago, I bit the inside of my lip.

This would not be a newsworthy event except that it kept swelling up and then going down, over and over and over again. When it would get almost all the way down, I would bite it again–by accident–and it would swell up again, even bigger this time.

The end result of this was that, by the end of last week, when I had delicious tea with him, I had a repulsive protuberance on my lip so distracting that, when I explained what had happened in the form of an amusing story, he blurted out, “Oh, thank God, because I’ve been staring at it not knowing what to say.”

My harelip was so grotesque, in fact, that it gave me a speech impediment. Ordinarily I have, like many gay Americans, a very slight lateral lisp. With the pustulant boil on my lower lip, though, the lisp was far more pronounced than usual; I also couldn’t say the letters F or V without a lot of extraneous hissing.

This made for a great class on Thursday, let me tell you, when we were discussing Falsettos.

In any case, I saw E.S. Friday night for the first time in a few days and he was horrified at what could only be an alien egg sac implanted in my lip. He attempted valiantly to ignore my deformity but the last straw came when I couldn’t kiss him in anything resembling an effective manner.

So he lanced it.

I will not provide details, as there are some things simply too gross to bear repeating. But I will say that he started with a paring knife (sterilized, of course, with rubbing alcohol–remember that he is a doctor); when that proved ineffective, he went on to a fondue fork. In the end it was a finishing needle that did the trick. The whole thing was especially unnerving given that we’d had a fight that morning in which I’d crankily blamed him for making me late to a meeting.

It’s entirely possible that there are more uncomfortable positions than sitting still while a man who may not have forgiven you for calling him a bastard pokes your mouth repeatedly with a sharp knife.

But I haven’t been in them.