My Favorite Scar

I had to accept the fact that, while she loved me deeply, she would never see or speak to me again. She would be defined for me by her absence, but, pervesely, also by her constant presence: magazine covers, automobile advertisements, even the occasional billboard. Gone, but all around.

I think that now, but the thought is really just a shred of confetti blown in my mental turbulence. Even after all, she's my favorite scar.

How about that?

The problem with having loved and lost is that you introduced to a hunger you can never sate. The problem with never having loved at all is that the hunger still is there, but you end up blindly feeding it your own soul.

You know her as Madeline M, this year's model, darling of the phosphor dot. Before that, she was simply Stacy Guillame. Yeah, before the surgical lottery and the implants and the skin tint and the million dollar makeover. Stacy Guillame. And we were in love, if you can believe such a thing in these times. Two young nobodies with nowhere to go, no hope, no way out. We had forty, maybe fifty years in the corporate grind to look forward to, decades in the little gray cubes, and if we made it through that, maybe another ten to twenty nursing our ulcers and shambling through the decayed shanties of our lives.

But you know about the lottery? The international plastic surgery/makeup conglom, promising to take one lucky unknown and make her a star? Yeah? How many women entered that lottery? Five, ten million? More?

Well, it was fixed. You knew it would be. I fixed it even more.

One corporate structure is much like any other. They are all massive, swampy deltas of ingrained incompetence and procedural logjams. But through all of them run the occasional clear brook of efficiency and data flow. You just have to find it. You just have to know the signs.

I quit my gray cube and managed to get hired into one at the skin conglom. I was patient. After all, the lottery was to take place in six months. I found the stream I needed. I navigated it until I found the woman I needed: overseer of the judging panel. I already knew her price; had known it from the very start. She was initially shocked, then disbelieving, and then at the last, when she totally understood that I meant it, delighted at her luck.

As you know, the skin conglom has sister companies. Cheif among them is the biomed giant, whose name you'd recognise were I legally allowed to divulge it, that specializes in custom tissue selection.

Most of us have to wait for farmed organs and limbs.

But there are those who have the means to do better.

Why settle for a cheap manufactured arm or liver, one fraught with all the possible glitches of the assembly-line production process, if, IF, you possess the means to obtain a quality, preowned part, one already demonstrated free of defects, one already broken in and ready to roll? No extensive replacement therapy, no returns to the surgeon to pull out a lung that slipped through quality control, no social embarrassment at a hand that fails spasmodically in the midst of the that season's gala event. Illegal? Oh hell yes, but legalities only matter to the poor.

The only thing I placed off limits were my eyes.

Stacy/Madeline never knew. She thinks I deserted her, and that kills me. But she is free of the cubes. She has the life, the freedom, we always yearned for.

And I tell you now, among them all, among my numerous, numerous fault lines, she remains my favorite scar.