personal history

It’s a terribly rude question, and I just want to know. I don’t need to know, or have to know. It is not vital to national security that I discover why, exactly, her skin is like it is and whether she is okay with it and how she really does feel in her body and how wonderful it is to see her exercising her ass off every time I am here. That is none of my business, any of it. Her body and its history is none of my business. But I wanted to talk to her, and I wanted it to be weight-loss surgery, and I wanted to be able to talk about weight-loss surgery with someone who has gone through with it and whose life has been changed however it was changed by it. I wanted to talk shop. I wanted to have a conversation with someone who maybe can tell me what I need to know–sometimes I feel like they forgot to give me the manual, and there’s so much I need to know.

This incredible, powerful urge to talk to her was so different from my usual urge to talk about my surgery, which springs from my usual sense that I have to apologize for having gone from a fat person to a skinny one, from having experienced a “results not typical” kind of weight-loss transformation like you read about in ads in the backs of gossip rags. I get positive feedback for my appearance in a way and a quantity that I have not previously experienced as a fat girl–I was hot when I was fat, but it turns out that fewer people in the world think that fat girls can in fact be hot. So I get this attention I’m not used to, which embarrasses me, and I feel like I need to qualify it and to test it, even. Well, yes, but surgery, and fatness, and do you still think I’m hot even though I am, in actuality, a fat girl lurking? She could burst through a brick wall like the Kool-Aid man, dude. Watch your back.

Confessing, all the time, asking for absolution. Talking to this woman wouldn’t be a confession, but a me too, hey, I recognize you. A statement of fact instead of an admission of guilt. I’ve never spoken to her though, and I probably never will. She is entitled to her personal history, to not be required and called upon to testify. To have me mind my own business while she minds hers. And with my luck, if I did talk to her it would turn out she has some kind of rare skin disease and I am even ruder than I thought.