On Being the Canvas

Okay, I am sitting here, covered in scribbly lines of black. I am Abstract Art (as opposed to being abstracted, which is my normal state**).

Yesterday morning I went to the plastic surgeon, who whipped out his Sharpie and went to work drawing dashed lines and interesting star patterns on my breasts. Which wasn't always comfortable, as he got at various bits by twisting my girlish bits around rather extremely... but that isn't why I started to pass out. And it wasn't anxiety about the coming surgery, either, as he solicitously assumed.

It was, as my brother-in-law so poetically put it, the longish period of 'huffing the Sharpie fumes'. I'm still a bit woozy.

I know this because as my PS warned me, these lovely 'cut along these dotted lines' were swiftly fading away by nightfall - considerably before any cutting was due to happen. Of course, my PS was thinking they would fade with baths and two days of accumulated skin oils. But I am Special, so 8 bathless hours or so seems to do the trick.

So my husband - a dear, dear man but NOT an artist (he failed 'scissors' in kindergarten, and hasn't gotten much better since) - had to try to trace the PS' artistically drawn lines, which he sort of did. I didn't pass out this time, but this was partially due to heightened anxiety and partly due to my preparedness for the rapid action needed to snatch the marker out of my loving spouse's hand before he accidentally directed Friday's surgeon to cut off my right arm.



I woke up this morning, and soon became aware of two things.

1.) You know those drawings of the old naked women with their breasts hanging down to their knees? Well, weight loss and newly-acquired menopause have arranged things so that when I am laying on my back and leaning slightly to one side or the other, one breast is smooth and familiar, but the other acquires a sort of, um, crushed-velvet appearance on one side that is not what one would normally think of as sexy. I mean, what one would think of sexy if it didn't have great black wobbly marks all over it. Well, if it didn't have great black wobbly blurry marks all over it, and charcoal-gray smudges everywhere else.

Anyway, it occurred to me that as of tomorrow, I will not have to worry any more about becoming the old woman with the scary dugs hanging down to her knees. I will have to worry about being the old woman with the saddle bags hanging down to her knees, instead. Yay!!

2.) See the above bit about the smudges and blurriness? Well, that is the bit that the PS hadn't predicted. Which is that during the night, my lines not only transfered to my bra... they also transfered to my arms and hands and the other breast, and everything else they touched. They also sort of ran a bit, like badly applied lipstick. So now the entire upper half of my body is covered with gray and black smudges, lines, and blotches, and the breasts are sort of a uniform gunmetal color with big vaguely-drawn lines on them.

I'm afraid to take a bath, for fear of washing the lines off entirely... but not anxious to go into the surgery room looking (and smelling) like an enthusiastically made-up chimney sweep from an amateur production of "Oliver Twist", either.

So I have to trace over those lines again... and again tonight, and again tomorrow morning.

Assuming that by then the lines will be visible against the background color...


**(Read some good books, improve your vocabulary. Or go the lazy route and look it up in the dictionary - that's what the internet is for.)