It was the way I sipped milk. Not swallowing in gulps. Letting it pool on my tongue and swirl around my mouth as it became the temperature of my body. It was the way I carefully peeled away the skin around my fingernails, sucking on the blood as I moved from thumb to index. My nails chewed to bone, to jagged scales of moon.

**

On the tour through Norway's fjords, we take three trains, a boat and a taxi. The second train curls through waterfalls and postcard mountains that look like soft towers of moss. After fighting for a spot on a crowded car, my family shares brown cheese and spicy salami. The train runs on a single track, and we get stuck at the only passing loop. Cliffs loom over us and small red houses peek out of the valley like poppies. We miss our boat because of the delay.

**

By the time I was eleven, all of my teeth had fallen out. All thirty-two pieces of me. Even the molars gave up and crumbled free. Sometimes, I let them hang like chimes, like a quiet song of ache. When they have all grown back, I am at a bar, and MMA fighting is on the television. A man spits two teeth out onto the mat. I can't help but stare, grind my own teeth. I run my tongue along my gums to make sure the connections are secure.

**

When the doctor pulled me out of my mother, I snapped like a dry twig. My collarbone broke right away. At this beginning, I was already a bone misshapen. My neck still arcs like a crossbow and juts through thin shirts. Like a brittle piece of spaghetti. Such a mess. I have not broken a bone since. Maybe a finger, jammed. A toe, I'm convinced, from when I ran through Florida barefoot. Fingers and toes, on the scale of broken things, do not count. They heal crooked and ugly but still, they heal.

**

On a single track train, you're headed right toward the other train. Head-on. Like you're playing chicken with something that can kill you. The only thing keeping the two trains from becoming a mess of steel and nails and people is the passing loop. A small section of track that bounces away from main line for a bit. This loop must be just as long as each train that needs to pass. If the signal is wrong or if the radio crackles too thick, and your train isn't waiting in the loop when the other train comes, there is nothing to be done.

**

Nail-biting is a form of self-cannibalism. I bite mine down into equal, jagged lengths. I chew the slivers of nail and click them against my teeth. I scrape away skin until my fingers are smooth and raw. I don't feel like I'm eating myself, because that's too strange to think about. I do, though, feel like I'm keeping parts of me inside. Putting the blood back where it belongs. Taking and giving in a cycle of scraps. My parents used to say that I was biting because I was nervous, but I wasn't. My tongue was just restless.

**

My father and my sister get in a fight in Oslo. We are outside of a market on a cobblestone street and my sister's voice leaps through the sun like a wolf. My father becomes a bigger, badder wolf. They are shouting about nothing and everything. My father wants to buy her a plane ticket home. Water runs through the streets in rivulets. The trains in Norway have cars that are just for sitting in silence. Norwegians are very private people. My mother and I walk ahead in embarrassment. We try to blend in. On the cobblestones, we are warned to watch where we step.

**

It was the way I took walks in small steps, two floor tiles at a time, one sidewalk crack away from killing my mother. It was the way I chewed on steak gristle when my parents chided me to take one more bite. I took my time. I was patient, but in a way that challenged the patience to quit. It was the way I chewed on fruit and stared at giraffes. It was the way their tongues looked like ropes of black blood.

**

In Fläm, we take the next boat and are not fast or rude enough to get a seat. As the boat chugs through the channel, my sister stuffs headphones in her ears and searches for a Wi-Fi signal. Hundreds of tourists begin to feed the seagulls. Soon, the boat is engulfed in a flurry of white feathers—we can't see the shore. Crumbs are flying like rice at a wedding. Grandmothers and grandfathers shriek with glee. A camera falls into the water. Bird shit coats the railings of the boat. I hide in the gift shop with thick Norwegian wool sweaters. I wait until it rains and the gulls grow tired.

**

My mother used to paint my nails with a thick, vaguely yellow polish that tasted like what I imagine the inside of a dead person would taste like. Acidic, sour, and rotten. Her French manicure was stark white against the dull umber of my own thumbs. My dumb, loose teeth clacked against my nails. I didn't bite. I learned.

**

My grandfather gives me the location of the cemetery in Sweden where his grandfather is buried. He tried to visit 30 years ago but the priest was away. My sister and I try to visit but we cannot figure out the train system. Whenever we leave the station, our phones lose their signals and it is like we're in a black hole. Or buried in dirt. We stay in a café where the Wi-Fi signal is strong and eat pastries until our teeth hurt and we forget about the grave. Maybe we will lie about this.

**

Her fingers hurt. Her hands hurt. My knuckles swell and I cannot twist the faucet hot without my hands becoming my mother's. Without them becoming a cluster of silver ache. When I look at my hands I see my mother's hands, twisting. When I look at my knuckles I see my bones sleeping. I see them becoming something else.

**

My father's front tooth is grey and made of something that isn't bone. When he curls his lips in thought like my grandfather, it peeks out like a dull opal. I got braces when I was five. I showed them off in kindergarten like they were jewelry.

**

Like the seagulls on the boat were all we came to see. Like whales weren't gliding underneath. Like my teeth were small red houses. Like my father holding me down as my teeth flew out of my mouth was any different than MMA fighting. Was any different kind of blood, any different kind of pain. Like my mother's hands were any different kind of swell, any different kind of bone. Like the small blue spacers pushing my jaw against itself were any different kind of hurt. Any different kind of patience.

**

Because we're on the later boat, we miss our bus in Gudvangen. A guide shuttles us onto a taxi that speeds through narrow tunnels and roads to Voss. I am using the data on my phone and refreshing my maps as the roads curl into a grey cursive. We make our train by mere seconds. The Bergen railway hurries through glacier towns and small villages. The ice is blue and milky. I fall asleep in waves until the fjords are behind us, and we are in Oslo again. In my memory, the fjords are hungry birds.

**

It was the way I recovered from the anesthesia. Silent, shivering, and missing my teeth. It was the way I slept through the night as a baby. The way I knew what I wanted but didn't think I deserved getting it. I was patient when they told me I couldn't string colored bands across my teeth like a kaleidoscope. When I learned to sleep still so the headgear stayed put. When my father turned a small key inside my mouth until it hurt. When I'd cough too hard and a tooth would fall out.

__

Families are strange. From the outside, no one really sees it. My family has its habits, its history, its own strange and confusing shapes. In this essay, my family's shapes shift and my body responds; it snaps, it stares at the seagulls, it tastes blood.