Open Wide, America—This May Sting a Little
My dentist and I discovered we're quantum entangled in the worst possible way during my root canal last Tuesday. Dr. Martinez was drilling into my molar while NPR played in the background—something about rising sea levels—and I made the mistake of mentioning that my friend's beach house in Pensacola has been flooding more each year, and how even here in Nokomis we're seeing the king tides push further up Venice Avenue than anyone remembers.
"Oh, that's just natural cycles," she said, adjusting the suction tube. "My grandfather fished these waters for sixty years. Red tide comes and goes too. Always has." Her hands, which moments before had felt steady and competent, suddenly seemed to be operating my mouth from inside a completely different universe.
I couldn't respond because my jaw was propped open with medieval torture devices, but I started cataloging the evidence scattered around her office: the family photos showing three generations of Florida fishing boats, the diploma from a state university I'd always considered second-rate, the small cross necklace catching fluorescent light as she leaned over me, the "Save Our Manatees" bumper sticker on her water bottle right next to one that said "Don't Blame Me, I Voted Republican." We were looking at the same X-rays of my dying tooth, but she was seeing individual decay while I was seeing systemic collapse, and both of us were absolutely convinced we had the diagnostic tools to understand what was rotting.
The Novocain wore off on my drive down Albee Farm Road, but the sensation of being operated on by someone from a parallel dimension lingered for days. I started paying attention to these quantum splits everywhere—how my Uber driver and I could sit in the same traffic jam caused by the same roundabout construction project, and he'd be cursing government waste while I was grateful they finally did something about that death trap intersection, both of us circling identical asphalt that somehow confirmed everything we already believed about who's destroying America.
My neighbor Carol brought me homemade soup when I was too sore to cook. We stood in my kitchen while she explained her recipe—onions, carrots, celery, the same ingredients my Mom uses, though Carol's ingredients come infused with talk about "real American values" and concern about "what they're teaching kids these days." I nodded and smiled because soup is soup and kindness is kindness, but I could feel us existing in different movies about the same kitchen, the same non-HOA community, the same Florida that was either being saved or destroyed by people who drove the same Subarus and shopped at the same Publix.
At my fifty-third birthday party, I served a store-bought cake from the Osprey Publix—chocolate with vanilla frosting, the safest possible choice for the handful of friends I've managed to make since moving here three years ago. My cousin Mike called from the farm to sing "Happy Birthday," his voice carrying across all those states like a reminder that love persists despite the fact that he thinks Florida is where New Yorkers go to ruin another state, while I think Sandy Creek is where people go to pretend climate change isn't melting the polar ice caps. But even this simple gathering revealed how we've been living in alternate universes without noticing. My friend Laura mentioned that her daughter just started at New College before DeSantis got to it, and within three minutes we'd somehow split into two camps: those who think higher education is destroying young minds and those who think book banning is destroying democracy. The cake tasted like safety until the words started, and then it tasted like evidence for whoever was right about what's wrong.
I've started carrying a notebook where I record these frequency splits, like a scientist documenting the exact moment consciousness divides into incompatible operating systems:
Tuesday, 3:47 PM: Wawa gas station. Attendant and I both complain about $4.89 regular. He blames Biden. I blame oil companies. Same receipt, different villains.
Thursday, 8:22 AM: Coffee shop on Gulf Gate. Woman ahead of me orders the same cortado I order. She mentions she pulled her kids out of Sarasota County schools after the library thing. I think about the teacher exodus. Same coffee, different fears about the same children.
Saturday, 2:15 PM: Bookstore on Main Street Sarasota. Man asks if they have anything about "real history"—not the woke stuff. Clerk recommends Howard Zinn. Customer walks away muttering about indoctrination. Same books, different definitions of truth.
Monday, 4:30 PM: Siesta Key beach access. Tourist from Ohio asking about parking fees while local woman says they should charge $10 to keep the riffraff out. Same white sand, different theories about who deserves paradise.
The pattern recognition that used to help me understand poetry now feels like a curse. I can see the exact moment when shared experience fractures into tribal interpretation, when the same data gets processed through completely different emotional filters until we're not even speaking the same language anymore. We're like radio stations broadcasting on frequencies so close they interfere with each other, creating nothing but static.
But here's what I realized while scrolling through my notebook at 2 AM, unable to sleep because my tooth was throbbing and my brain was throbbing with the recognition of how completely we've lost each other: maybe the pattern isn't political at all. Maybe it's neurological.
My ex-husband used to insist that cilantro tasted like soap, while I tasted bright herbaceous notes. Same plant, same mouth, different genetic receptors. We could share a meal and literally taste different realities, and neither of us was wrong. The cilantro wasn't objectively delicious or disgusting—it was just cilantro, being interpreted by whatever biochemical equipment we'd inherited for making sense of green leafy things that grew in the same Tug Hill plateau.
What if political division is just cilantro on a societal scale? What if we're not choosing to hate each other, but discovering that we've been equipped with fundamentally different apparatuses for processing the same reality? My dentist isn't evil for seeing natural cycles where I see climate emergency—she's just running different pattern-recognition software, calibrated by growing up watching her grandfather pull redfish from waters that have been weird and unpredictable for as long as anyone can remember, trying to make meaning from the same chaotic data stream that keeps flooding all of us with more information than any human brain was designed to metabolize.
This should be comforting. It's not.
Because if consciousness is just biochemistry interpreting electromagnetic radiation, if love and democracy and truth are just consensus hallucinations we've agreed to share, then what happens when the consensus dissolves? What happens when half the population is running iOS and half is running Android, and they can't communicate with each other except through Facebook algorithms that keep getting the emotional subtitles wrong?
My tooth healed, but the frequency split with Dr. Martinez didn't. She still takes good care of my mouth, and I still pay my bills on time, but we've learned to avoid eye contact during procedures, to keep the conversations limited to "open wider" and "rinse and spit." We coexist in the same small room, breathing the same recycled air, sharing the same professional relationship, but we're no longer pretending we live in the same universe. The "Save Our Manatees" sticker is still there, right next to the Republican one, and I've stopped trying to figure out how someone can love sea cows and vote for politicians who gut environmental protections.
Maybe this is what passes for hope now: not that we'll find our way back to consensus, but that we'll learn to be gentle with each other's incompatible operating systems. That we'll keep making soup for neighbors whose reality feels like science fiction.
That we'll remember, when the Novocain wears off and everything starts hurting again, that pain is the one frequency we all still receive clearly—the signal that broadcasts from whatever part of us hasn't learned to translate suffering into evidence for why the other side is wrong.
The tooth is fine now. The country might not be. But the soup was good, and the dentist's hands were steady, and somewhere underneath all our incompatible interpretations of the same bleeding world, we're still taking care of each other's bodies, one small professional kindness at a time.
Maybe that's the carrier wave—not agreement, but the persistent, stubborn practice of staying tender toward people whose consciousness feels like interference with our own.