Perfection
Jane Nash: ‘Perfection’ – basead on a true story
It was never recommended by anything she’s heard of. He decides not to tell her.
“I’ve done hundreds’ he lies. In his office you can see the many success stories he purports to have been instrumental in creating.
He considers sculpture- the creating something beautiful. He sees himself an artist. He assures her he is part of a few in the world who can make such sculptures.
She is searching for perfection but she has a poor pocket for pennies. She looks at pictures in magazines on a daily basis. Glossy photographs that show each curve and shape she covets, She dreams deeply in her sleep of having, of being. She meets with someone with a reputation near to her home. The price is too high and her heart is discouraged not to be able to live a perfect life. She is convinced through TV and social media that she has less than she desires, perhaps it’s less than she deserves. It’s difficult not to feel entitled to whatever strikes you when everyone in sight seems to live a perfect life. That’s her word. Perfect. She wants to feel perfection about most things. She saves for the perfect shoes. She saves for the perfect kitchen. She spends her money on perfection in any way she can.
She arrives in Costa Rica, convinced it is here she will buy her way to perfection. The humidity hits her; she goes into the reception area where there are tropical flowers on display. She thinks of her succulents at home. There is a small marble top table with two chairs beside. Upon the table are brochures of women and men in perfect proportion. She keeps her mask on. He comes in and shakes her hands. She sanitises them immediately.
He turns her body to view her from the side. ‘Yea, this is an easy job’ he smiles without engaging the little lines around his eyes. She wonders why she feels uncomfortable.
Back at the hotel there is that little voice nagging at her, to call it quits, to go home, to save what little money she has, to commit to going to the gym every day. It has taken her so long to save for this procedure. Even two of her cousins have given her a thousand dollars each to help her feel better about herself. She showers, sweating from the humidity. She catches sight of her body in the long bathroom mirror. She hates her shape. No man will love her with such a flat bottom. A boy’s bottom.
Surgery takes time and she wakes in the recovery room. Her buttocks are suitably enlarged but they feel lumpy. She is nauseated. ‘It will pass, it’s normal’ says the grin behind the mask with empty eyes.
She waits four days in her hotel room, lying mainly on her stomach, the pain is beyond anything she has experienced before. The pain is excruciating on the flight back to Michigan. She cries at the pain in her sleep. In quite a short time her less than perfect implants begin to dissipate into her legs causing her a deep ache and what appears to be permanent water retention. She finds it increasingly difficult to walk. The lumps never perfect, never smooth out.
She saves her money, sure that she needs another enlargement, but concerned about the current implants she goes to her doctor and tells him of her Costa Rican adventure. It doesn’t take too long to biopsy one of the lumps. Her idea of perfection will never be attained.
What was dissipating throughout her legs and the lumps in her buttocks, was something irreversible, now interstitial… There is no way of knowing if it will spread into her organs. Her vanity is the price of now arrested longevity. The implant? Cement.
