April 11, 2017 - 13:21
The tongue is a muscle, contracting and moving as one unit with two underlying motors. It tastes, not like the whiplike motion of a snake, but with the visceral realness of it’s own surface. It makes sour and sweet and bitter and salty and it makes memories that link themselves with flavors or with disgust or with ice cream melting in your hands on a hot boardwalk.
Where little buds work together to spread and change what we experience, to shape how our brains light up and glow, to deliver the message that poison is bitter and that sugar cubs are sweet.
There are 10,000 taste buds on our tongues, and they’re unique, like fingerprints. Some love the taste of sour, drinking lemons dry as if they were lemonade, while other pucker and throw the rinds away with the garbage.
It is the strongest muscle in the body. It is the most sensitive muscle in the body.
Our tongues allow speech, to move against the roof of our mouth and the tips of our teeth and to talk with words that swim around before erupting out of our mouths. The tongue is the strongest muscle in the body.
It lets us demonstrate, speak, speak out, speak loud, to scream, to yell, to sing, to be silent if we must and to break it when we can. The tongue is underrated.
The tongue is also locked in a cage, glued to our braces and dentures, wiped clean by toothpaste, scrubbed dry at the dentist. Shoved with gags and burned by hot tea or coffee, silenced by cigarettes and bad food obtained by stamps.
It’s surprising we even have tongues anymore.
We’re afraid of them.
We’re grossed out by them, revolted, even in our wishes to share.
We want to change the world. We want to change something.
Perhaps I should split my tongue and give it twice the chance to be free.