Dear Flat Tush,

In one of my cancer books, it suggests that perhaps we write a letter to the parts of us that have physically changed as a result of cancer and its treatment. Thus, I bring you…

Dear Flat Tush,

I suppose it’s taken me so long to face you, because I can’t keep on turning around and around to try and see you in the full-length mirror. However, now that I have the chance to speak with you more formally, I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.

For so many years, I have put you down, making fun of you for being so flat that you're like a straight line from my back to my thighs. Telling others I can't sit on inflatable rafts for fear of puncturing them with my protuberant butt bones. The times that I've rolled my eyes at how uncomfortable you make it to sit on metal or wooden furniture, wishing, oh wishing, you'd be different. For years I have assumed that you would just go on taking my derision, and put up with being the butt end of my jokes.

But sadly, this has not been the case. Since my developing cancer and becoming, if possible, even more sedentary, you have become … concave.

The scooped-out innards of an ice-cream container, the weird thing a foam pillow does when you press your fist in it, that desperate vision of a bounce-house deflating. 

Oh, Flat Tush, Flat TUSH!

You are now but a former shadow of the flatness that you once were, it seems almost a dream how you were before – I swear, you were actually pert… or pert-like. I promise I only incessantly poked at that crease out of love. That tense/release thing I used to do to pretend you were something more than you were… oh, how insensitive of me!

I see now how lucky I was with you before, and how much we’ll need to firm up a new relationship of trust. I shouldn’t have taken you for granted, Flat Tush. With all that cancer has taken from you, I promise to build you back up to your (only-mildly-flat!) former glory. 

On my honor,

Molly