Recently I’ve been enjoying my new-found status as a single person. It’s truly liberating to not have to think about what your ‘significant other’ wants to do, or thinks, or might react to what you want to do, or think. Sure, there are some elements of a stable relationship (with someone stable) that I miss, but not necessarily enough to jump back into it all again. I have a good friend who has been navigating a new relationship recently, and watching them deal with the misunderstandings, the personal neuroses, and the baggage that a prospective partner comes with, has made me wonder whether it is all worthwhile. Does “three minutes of squelching noises” (to quote Johnny Rotten) justify all of the crap that you have to put up with just to get to that point? In terms of cost/benefit, I’m not entirely convinced that it does. Maybe I’m just too independent. Maybe I’m too self-centered. Maybe I’m just a miserable fuck (quite possibly literally as well as figuratively) who doesn’t really like other people. I don’t know. But I was beginning to accept – actually, to look forward to – a quiet dotage of solitude. But then something happened last week that made me reconsider.
I was trying, with some difficulty, to scratch an itch in the middle of my back. After contorting myself into positions Harry Houdini would have probably employed to escape from a straitjacket, in a barrel, whilst heading over Niagra Falls, I finally managed to get my finger to the offending itch, only to discover a lump. I’ve never found any other lumps on my back, or anywhere else, for that matter, so I was a little alarmed. Maybe it was because a friend of mine had recently discovered a lump (on himself, I hasten to add…) that turned out to be a benign growth, and my overworked sense of competition was determined to find a malign one of my own, but immediately my mind jumped to thoughts of the Big C. We’d had a presentation on skin cancer at work a while back, and this lump certainly felt rough, and odd-shaped, just like they’d described. I tried to get a better look, but it was positioned right in the middle of my back, about halfway down, which meant that unless I could spin my head around like Linda Blair in the Exorcist, there was little chance of me being able to see it.
I tried to find a hand-mirrior, but then remembered that my ex had taken it to her feminist ‘learn to love yourself’ class, and I just couldn’t look into it after that… So I had to back up to the huge mirrors in the bathroom, looking over my shoulder, and twisting left and right in the vain hope that my front could spin round faster than my back, and I’d manage to get a glimpse of the offending contusion before it dissappeared in back of me again. (Yes, I too thought that “in back of” was a grammatical error, when I saw it on my daughter’s homework, but the grammar gods tell me it is a valid prepositional phrase, and a logical antonym to “in front of”, so I’ll accept it.). But despite doing my best impression of one of those mad, homeless people who always seem to be whirling around trying to bite their own face, I couldn’t get a clean look at it in the mirror, and gave up.
I figured that maybe technology could come to my aid, and tried photographing it with my phone (try finding one without a camera these days…), but could never get the phone at the right angle, and only managed to capture a succession of (thankfully blurred) photos of everything from my ass-crack to my armpit. But no mystery mole. And my webcam was no better, with its paltry 1.3mp camera revealing nothing more than a slab of pixellated pink. (So all that talk of remote diagnosis by doctors for shut-ins (as I hope one day to become) is a lie. All a doctor would be able to tell from my webcam images is that my ass-crack could do with a waxing. And I’m sure my medical insurance doesn’t cover that. Or I would have had it done already.)
So there I was, some horrendous melanoma eating away at my back, and no way of even staring the instrument of my clearly impending death in the face. Which is the point at which I realized that being alone in life may not be so much fun. I really needed someone there to look at it for me, to confirm my fears, and wipe away my tears. The kids were with their mom for the weekend and weren’t due back until the next day, and given that cancer has a nasty habit of spreading like…well, cancer, I could well be dead by then. A feeling of hopelessness at the inevitability of it all washed over me. I spent the rest of the evening mulling over the need to type up a quick will, and went to bed early, quite sure that I would never get up from it again.
Thankfully, the next morning I did wake up, and still seemed to have the use of my arms and legs, and none of the parts of my body I could see had dissolved through necrotizing fasciitis, or grown huge cancerous tumors in the night, so my accumulation of good karma had clearly earned me another day on Earth. (Helping that old lady across the road when I was younger had clearly paid off.) Unfortunately, my joie de vivre was short-lived, as a cursory glance over my shoulder into the mirror revealed that the ‘thing’ had apparently grown in the night -both laterally and vertically – now resembling a third nipple. At least to the extent that I could tell from the very corner of my blurry eye – although my over-active mind could easily have made it look like any one of a number of omenous (sic) signs.
Somehow I struggled on through the day, until I heard a car door outside and the kids arrived home. I immediately whisked my eldest upstairs, whispering “Hey, I need you to look at something for me”. He shot a glance to crotch-height and said “Um, do I have to?”. I reassured him it was above the waistband and whipped my shirt off. He looked at my back, and took a sharp intake of breath. I braced myself for the worst. “What is it? Is it brown? Mis-shapen? It’s a tumor isn’t it? It’s cancer. Oh god, I’m going to die, aren’t I?” I cried. He leant in closer to it, wincing as he did so. “Jeezus, dad! that’s the biggest zit I’ve ever seen!” he said, before casually flicking a fingernail over it, lopping off the top, and leaving me with a veritable Vesuvius of red and yellow trickling down my back, and a look of sheepishness mixed with self-revulsion on my face. And sure enough, a couple of days later, the scab dropped off, and my back was returned to its pristine, bronzen and muscular appearance. OK, well I can’t be sure about that – because I can’t see it – but that’s how I imagine it, and despite a full fingertip search I can’t find any more blemishes, boils, or carbuncles, so I’m probably right.
So I may not actually have been at death’s door, and in truth I didn’t actually need a ‘significant other’ to hold as cancer ravaged my otherwise healthy body, but I am still thinking that maybe investing in another relationship may be a good idea. Otherwise, who is going to burst my back-zits when the kids have all left home??
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