an homage to my whiskers
over the holidays Ulrich and I watched a Netflix special about cats which mentioned that they use their whiskers to gauge the width of a space before entering it, since the hairs are approximately the same length as their bodies are wide. however: an adult cat’s whiskers will not grow any longer if it gains weight, a fact which may lead to amusing scenes wherein a cat tries to squish itself into too-narrow spaces because their uninformed whiskers keep insisting, against reality, that they should be able to fit through.
inspired by this tidbit, today i am paying homage to my body parts which have stayed, as far as i can tell, unchanged as i’ve grown older - despite countless weight gains and losses, through spurts of alcohol and drug abuse, amidst joy and anxiety and intense grief and a whole catalogue of human emotions in between:
my eyebrows - although i do pluck them every few months, my eyebrows have remained relatively constant in terms of thickness and shape since my mid-twenties. this is surprising because i plucked, waxed and threaded them so often earlier in life, i felt sure that they would require constant maintenance throughout the course of my life. thank you, dear eyebrows, for giving me a break!
my sideburns - i used to think my sideburns looked masculine and rough - long, bristly strips running down the side of my face which i attempted to hide as a teenager by never tucking my hair behind my ears. since then i have learned to accept and mostly ignore my sideburns, and find it somewhat amusing that they have stayed intact despite the hair loss which seems to be accelerating near the top of my part (i might be imagining things but this appears to have worsened post-COVID)
my lips - purplish-pink, extra chapped and flaky in winter. as far as i can tell they’re still the exact same asymmetrical shape which they’ve always been, with the left peak slightly higher than the right one.
my elbows and knees - knobby, wobbly, a tad askew. easy to bruise and ashy in the summer. in middle school i had hoped that my legs would eventually “fill out” so that my knees would not always poke out so dramatically when i wear shorts, but alas!
my fingernails - in middle school PE class there was a mandatory unit on “personal care,” where all us girls were siphoned off and taught, among other things, how to give ourselves manicures. back then i could never decide whether to file my nails into a round or square shape - neither way seemed to look quite right, as my nails were both too short for the round shape and too oblong for the square. i often wondered if starting to play the violin at the age of 4 permanently ruined my chances for long, delicate nails to form - instead, they grew stubby and uneven at around the same place as my violin callouses.
my bellybutton - i used to find it deeply troubling that my bellybutton was neither an innie nor a pure outtie. i think it might have grown less innie and more outtie somewhere between the ages of 10 and 13, a progression which i desperately wanted to halt as most of the bellybuttons in Seventeen magazine were innies. it wasn’t until an ex-boyfriend showed me his belly button lint that i finally began to appreciate my largely hairless, more-outtie-than-innie hybrid!
Oh wow an inventory of the stasis bits of the body, of course I’d love this! Also regarding belly button lint, a friend of mine used to save his belly button lint for me and then I’d frame it’s multicolored fuzziness between two little panes of glass. Fun to put you together via this body puzzle by the way!