Let It Sink In

By Liv Stripling

“Let It Sink In” is a short montage film translation of a piece that I wrote revolving around teeth. It’s an exploration of love and relationships through using teeth metaphors and food/teeth imagery.

I keep my baby teeth on my bedside table. 
They’re waterlogged with the waves of my dreams, covered in cavities that got filled with sugar and wax. Every single one was pulled out by a child’s hands. 
Imagine wire tying adolescence to a door handle, a pseudo-child kicking the door closed and licking the blood off her gums. 

If given a choice between love and death, I’d choose to roll my tongue over your teeth and lick off the cyanide that bleeds from your gums. I would kiss a molar and draw the taste from your mouth with my own. 
It isn’t about suffering. 
It isn’t about a “lack of suffer”. 
I just want to taste your teeth in a school hallway and have you hate me for it, forever. 

I’d love for your tongue to become a trophy of my desire, no longer tasteful and now outdated, burned by something too hot, something for which you couldn’t wait to cool down. 

I always wonder what you would say if I told you I love you. 
You could barely speak when it was just a crush, a sweet tooth growing out of my waist and biting at your hand whenever your arm was around me. 
So, let’s chat physical boundaries, yeah?
I can grind my teeth and soften your mind with my tongue, it’s burnt scars emitting blood into my throat as I talk for both of us. 


I’m so sorry. Is this harsh?
I think you’re one of the most perfect and lovely people I’ve ever known. I really do love you. 
I feel it in the way my teeth freeze my brain and glue their ends together in a notion of joy. 
And I’d gladly gnaw on any subject that you can’t discuss, gladly would bite your foes to pieces even if it breaks my code of moral misguided conduct. 


I really can’t help but apologize now, for the way you misread when I pulled your teeth out of your gums. It doesn’t make sense why I keep pliers in my back pocket and a pouch under my tongue. 
Will you let me kiss you, even after my mouth just betrayed my mind? 
Can I kiss you? 

Process

I spent weeks walking around my neighborhood and meeting with my friends to film these clips. I put it together using a voiceover of me reading a piece written about teeth. My latest writing piece focused on hands, and I found that I wanted to incorporate hands into this film as well. I played with parallels between nature and light, as well as with words and actions. This is a montage in every sense of the word, and I love that some of these clips make no sense in the context of the words behind it. I enjoyed making this because I felt it was a bit of chaos, and I love to write pieces that confuse the reader upon first read.