Oh….How some remember. *Birthday card from the bestie, circa ’10.
4- years of working for the devil Hollister Co. For years, your inundated with rhetoric on racial sensitivity, proper workplace conduct, employee rights, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Only to be dispatched to the same posts. Light- complexioned models by the entrance. Darkest tones into the basement. Those whom don’t appear “all-American” enough or “brand positive” go upstairs. You wear schoolgirl uniforms, booty shorts, pajamas, shirtless man-boys in the tightest jeans…..; and the entire time your maced with a pure concentrate of their signature scent: Eau de ….the FDA prohibits the spraying of contents in enclosed spaces, direct inhalation, highly flammable.
I think that’s what it’s called.
Slowly, but surely, you wake up with a cough. There’s a constant ringing in your ears from the blaring music set at…taca-taca-taca decibels, and you start to point out to one another that you’re missing nasal hairs. Those little filters in your nose which…. Gone just like that; thanks to Eau de….. carcinogens, can lead to male infertility, don’t spray near or under lights. You quit one-day, before the ringing in your ear subsides quick enough to think things through. The madness has made you smarter.
Then you spend the next weeks, a month researching ways to detoxify yourself: milk thistle; green tea; lemon water; an apple cider vinegar, maple syrup and cayenne pepper concoction; remaining dedicated use of fragrance free products.
La-la-la-la You can write a song about it.
There was abstaining from red dye # whatever. I dunno. Then you read studies about parabens mimicking estrogen in breast tissue, causing abnormal growths, and it reminds you/ me/ it of the time…. I had an office job.
I was on the subway, large purse, largest purse, standing; actually strap hanging- like they use to call it back in the day. A sharp pain shot through my left boobie, and up my arm, till I could hang from the over head bar no more. Pain all day, night, week. Till one-day I look down and see a lump the size of a dime protruding from a lower quadrant of my breast. It’s funny how quickly your boobie becomes a breast, and what situations prompt you to think of them in quadrants. Think.
You run to urgent care, and you expose yourself to an MD who can’t disguise the look of “Holy Shit!” on her face. A week later you have a sonogram. Although, you know you’re going to die because the pain in your chest is worse than when you had all your childhood boosters combined, along with a flu shot and a pneumonia vaccine. Your arm gets heavy. You can no longer carry your large bag home. A week later you arrange to pick up your radiology films, and carry them to the Lord blessed Medical Center; where you sit and wait. You sit and wait for the kindest breast surgeon to tell you that you have Fibrocystic Breast Disease (Now called Fibrocystic Breast Condition, FBC.), and while the lumps are strange and they’re gonna hurt like hell; You’re going to live.
So here you/ It/ I get a new lease on life, only to……do nothing… cause you have to pay the rent.
Oh… the things we do for the all might dollar, but you’re gorgeous while you do it, Babe. So until the day, the ringing madness in your head slaps the unconscious, rational being, sitting alone side it into the sober inferno of your reality; you slather yourself in Origins Ginger Souffee Whipped Body Cream before bed. Then put all eight of your cancer free quadrants in a “payday bra.” (You can afford it this time. You stood outside in plaid, pajama short-short and Hunter Boots, for 4-hours in 36-degree Fahrenheit, and got an extra $100, remember. Just remember: “Living the dream.”
No Comments