There are eggs in my mouth. Tons of them, hiding in every crevice, appearing seemingly from nowhere. I try not to crush or swallow them as I pull them out, spit them out, but there are more still.
The eggs are in various shapes and conditions, some tiny, some twisted, some clustered together, fused in ways that suggest nothing living could come from them. But they hatch. The face of a gecko here, another there. Some of the geckos are enormous, almost fully-grown, some are tiny, as if the eggs they came in hatched too soon. One has three words formed in the patterning on his back. Ark something.
There are enclosures all over my room, mostly finely decorated as if I had spent time on each one. My current flock is inundated with an ever-increasing number of babies, and I am haphazardly stuffing the critters into whatever enclosure I can reach, only to realize the more adult-sized animals will likely devour the smaller ones or hurt them in some way. So I am pulling out the babies to put into another enclosure. It is, at best, hectic.
And still, there are eggs in my mouth.
It seems a trauma, the unexpected surprise of the first egg, the poor decision making of geckos too young being allowed to breed, the deterioration of health of babies and adults alike. The dreams come often with forgotten animals crawling out of dry soil, the inability to find a location for all of these critters, the worry about their health, and how many dead will be uncovered. Occasionally the dreams are of babies hatching with significant deformities, and heartbreak. Eggs I take to the bathroom to rinse in the sink briefly, I think.
I carry them in my mouth.
An unending series of loss with no time to process. Horrible things happening with no real means to stop them. Watching loved ones deteriorate. An unending series of progression, of building better, bigger spaces, of rearranging continuously to make room. A project that will never be finished, never fully realized. Never worked through.
There is an unprocessed grief in my mouth.
