A major event in my personal history. I am still in pain as I write this, though the degree of pain is hard to gauge. I can chat and laugh, but I can't say it's nothing — with things we must endure, it's difficult to assess their true impact. How painful is a tooth extraction, really? In any case, when it happened to me, it was a bearable kind of pain. Perhaps some pains are unbearable — but don't we have to bear them anyway? I splurged on a Didi Premier ride to the dentist's office — a Honda Accord, whose suspension rebounded with a firm resilience over bumps and ruts, making a sound like a Chinese domestic shorthair cat leaping from a rooftop into the swelling drum of a spring evening's air. So the ride there was quite pleasant indeed. As I chatted with the driver, I imagined the scene of the extraction, and laughed out loud. The core of my fantasy was a tiger. The dentist demonstrates respectfully before him: "Ahhh— Ahhh— Ahhh—." The tiger sits stiffly in the brown treatment chair, spreading his body out awkwardly, paws draped over the armrests, ready at any moment to raise a hand when the pain becomes unbearable. He mimics the doctor — "Ahhh—" — and opens his mouth. In terms of sheer presence, a trace of the tiger's authority remains. But the beautiful lady dentist quickly slips her hand into his mouth, directs the angle of his skull and the opening and closing of his jaws, and sets to work with various instruments. Mr. Tiger first feigns sleep to ease the awkwardness, then opens his eyes to observe the busy reflection in the doctor's glasses. This composure doesn't last long — the doctor clamps down with forceps and wrenches out a molar. The tiger splays his toes as wide as they'll go and emits, from the depths of his throat, the anguished cry of the king of beasts. Blood spurts from his mouth, spraying the doctor's face. His whiskers are studded with beads of blood. His forepaws clutch his chest as he slumps sideways, gasping for breath. This scene is what I described on my social media as "meow-ish and pitiful." What actually happened was nothing like this. First of all, I am not a tiger. The beautiful lady dentist did exist — that's precisely why I made up the story. What actually happened was unremarkable, not even as good as my fantasy. After the lady dentist did her preliminary work, they brought in a male dentist of the type colloquially known as "the smiling tiger" to extract my tooth. The smiling tiger was even gentler than the lady dentist. But the essential problem lay in my position of utter helplessness, of being at their mercy. I thought about the process by which a person loses themselves. Because of a single tooth, in this moment, in these few hours, I became a person with no function other than opening my mouth — a person incapable of self-care. As one ages, such things will happen more and more. Among them, there will surely be one time from which there is no return. Of course, I did perform rather well. When the smiling tiger tested the anesthesia and asked if it hurt, I was puzzled, so I asked him: should I judge by whether there is objective pain, or by whether I can bear it? Within the pain I could bear, they extracted the tooth that had been tormenting me. When it came out, I felt nothing — absolutely nothing — as if a tree of pain had been uprooted from the surface of my skull without my noticing. Just like every loss before the age of thirty, and just as every loss after thirty will be: by the time I felt it, she had already gone somewhere else.