03.03.06 In the Smallest of Openings I was not nervous. I had no opinion. All I knew was that I was going to be different and that difference would be for good. On Monday morning, I lay pristine in layers of blue, while my chest was cut open: silicon implants squeezed into the smallest of openings. The pain would prove to be almost unbearable. To think women electively choose to open up their chests to the unknown, to be a shadow of their former selves? I also took it upon myself to become something other than, to become a shadow of my former self. Bound tight my chest rolls with the intention of the female identity I knew, and with this transformation, the reconstruction becomes a voice of something odd, yet somehow familiar. It is the transformation of a historical closing, a passing from one life to another. The cancer is behind me. The chemo is over. I see the end and I feel somehow lost. To move on. To embrace the grace of survivorship. To see the world as mine, my own, reconstructed, idealized. I am all of these things: survivor, beauty, bravado in the making. I am my own gossamer, now, and for eternity. I am me. Forever.
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