1/6/2023 0 Comments Day o goodbye song![]() ![]() You should never be afraid to tell me anything.” “I’m not so upset,” she said, sitting across the table from me in her Brooklyn kitchen. I told her I knew she might be upset, and that I had been afraid to tell her for a long time. When I first told my grandmother I was having surgery, I worried about what her reaction might be. Often, it does so even better than the original name. Somehow, my grandma’s nomenclature always manages to capture the essence of a thing. A neighbor’s dock gets christened Jones Beach, in a nod to how crowded it is. A local restaurant, Rogue Cafe, has been permanently renamed The Scoundrel in our family. One of the lovely consequences of the fact that English is not my grandmother’s first language is that she comes up with her own creative ways of saying things. I told friends the story for weeks afterwards. “Where in Florida is that surgeon, anyway?” she said. What? I scoured my brain for what she could possibly be referring to-my teaching position? A job coming up after I finish graduate school? I couldn’t even begin to place it. “I was thinking about your upper job,” she said. The first time she said it, we were driving on the highway, with me behind the wheel and her in the passenger seat. My grandmother calls it my “upper job.” That’s how she refers to the surgery I’m having in a little over eight weeks, when a plastic surgeon in Florida will cut two long, curving lines across my chest and remove some two to five-probably closer to five, because I’m not small-pounds of breast tissue. I’m scrambling, scribbling hastily down the barrel of 51 days, trying to preserve not the body, but the space. I am only now realizing: I have something to record, a certain existence to capture before it disappears forever. ![]() As I write this, I am 51 days from surgery by the time you are reading it, I will be on the other side, an entire era of my body having come to a close and another begun. Until now, I’ve never written about this part of my body that joined me on this planet some two decades ago and soon will depart again, its stay with me only temporary, as it turns out. ![]() It had never occurred to me, before this day, that this was a feeling I could have. Perhaps it is even simpler, though: I loved the way I looked. Ecstasy comes close euphoria is the word we sometimes use. There is no word for the pleasure of seeing yourself as you always imagined yourself to be, but that is exactly what I felt, looking into the blue plastic-framed glass in my childhood bedroom. You couldn’t have torn me away from the mirror that day-I stood in my bedroom for I don’t know how long, marveling at the way my white T-shirt fell against my flat chest. Not even when I was fourteen years old and put on a binder for the first time. Not when I had my first consultation, when I was eighteen, or when I finally booked the date, seven months ago. Not for the nineteen years I’ve been thinking about having this surgery. This Is My Abortion Story.Īnd yet: I’ve never written about my chest.
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