I believe in love (what else can I do?)

My scar is healing nicely. It's so big. 6 inches. I'm shocked by its size every time I see it in the mirror. Anyone who asked me before the surgery will tell you I wanted it to be big. To be as huge and drastic externally as it felt internally. To leave a mark--something to remember this whole ordeal by. Well, I got my wish.

My abdomen has never been a favorite part of my body, so I'm not terribly grieved by its mutilation. My main problem was how horrified I was in the hospital by the staples. I expected it to look like a zipper running down my stomach, but instead it literally looked like I'd been attacked by an office stapler. If I wasn't disgusted enough by the look and feel of it, people constantly checked on it, informing me how 'great' the incision looked.

I have a weird desire to show it to everyone. I want to see if it grosses them out or they think it's cool. It's not very polite to put people in that position, so I've been keeping my shirt down for the most part. I wonder if it's a desire to prove to people that I had the surgery. "See? I didn't make it all up! Look at the size of that scar! It was all real and not some fever dream!"

Growing up I remember my mom telling me about a couple we knew. The wife had disfigured legs--I don't know from what. And my mom told me that once she overheard the husband say matter-of-factly in reference to his wife, "I'm not a legs man." I've always thought that the moral of this story was that no one is perfect, and you find someone who appreciates your best features, and doesn't care about the rest. My abdomen doesn't really apply to this logic anyway, because a 'stomach man' wouldn't have cared much for its state pre-surgery, but now that I have this new mark on my body, I can't help but think of what it would look like or mean to a lover. As this whole saga is over and ended (or ending), any person I might meet or be with will only see the scar, and not have witnessed the journey that led to it. That will be mine alone.