270 Days #2
Rhea: Actually gimme the number
Tiny responded with Danny’s number.
Rhea began crafting the perfect text, something that made her sound easygoing and playful.
Rhea: What’d I miss? Did Gary and Lisa’s finale blow your mind?
Rhea hit send and stared at her phone for sixteen minutes. And just when crippling regret started to take hold, making her wish she had never met Danny or Tiny or anyone involved in this whole devastating saga, Danny responded: I think I reached enlightenment
Rhea waited four minutes and wrote back: Wow, you’re taking my FOMO to a whole new level
Seven minutes later, Danny: Oh no! You didn’t miss much I promise. We did synchronized breathing. Would have much rather partnered with you than Greta…which is…WILD EYES’S NAME
Rhea tried to match his agonizing pace and wait seven minutes but caved at minute four and wrote: Oh my God. You are my hero
When he didn’t write back for five minutes, she added: I slept two hours past checkout
Six minutes after that, he wrote: Dammit. That’s on me. I tried to wake you up. But I didn’t try hard enough. You looked so peaceful and we stayed up so late
She waited to respond. She could feel him pulling away; something in the energy of the texts and the hourlong minutes between them.
She wondered if he had not enjoyed the hookup as much as she had.
She walked into her bathroom and examined her nose.
The itch to make it smaller overcame her.
She was used to this itch. Whenever a man did not reciprocate her feelings, she blamed the nose.
She sat down at her laptop, googled Chinese foot binding, and read the entire Wikipedia page. She did this whenever her desire to alter her face became strong enough to consider making an actual appointment with a plastic surgeon.
“To enable the size of the feet to be reduced, the toes on each foot were curled under, then pressed with great force downward and squeezed into the sole of the foot until the toes broke.”
This was the sentence that kept Rhea from going through with cosmetic rhinoplasty.
She had heard modern people judge the ancient practice of Chinese foot binding, the act of breaking a woman’s foot in half and folding it under so it could fit into a three-inch-long shoe.
People talked about how insane and barbaric it was—“Can you imagine breaking your own feet, just to make them smaller? Just to be considered attractive?”
She feared that having her nose reduced was the exact same thing. It seemed like the only real difference between the two practices was general anesthesia. Which was not that small of a difference, considering the monumental amount of pain generations of Chinese women had endured.
Rhea imagined a woman in the far-off future, reading about cosmetic rhinoplasty on whatever the future version of Wikipedia would be: “Can you imagine breaking your own nose, just to make it smaller?”
Rhea envisioned this future woman with an absolutely enormous nose, a nose that drove people wild with desire.
Considering humankind’s track record, a new practice would commence during the inevitable large-nose trend: People born with tiny noses would suck the fat out of their thighs and inject it into their nostrils, longing for a thick schnoz.
The constantly shifting beauty standards were among Rhea’s top ten causes of anxiety.
In her twenties, she had every single hair from her upper lip down to her toes lasered off.
It cost more than her first car and hurt tremendously, but the payoff was getting to feel like a ten-year-old girl with almost no maintenance.
She did wish she lived in a utopian society in which adult women were considered more attractive than ten-year-old girls, but societal norms were what they were, and she figured one hirsute woman was not going to be able to change them.
After several rounds of painful lasering, her body hair stopped growing back.
She began to nurse a fear society would someday grant pubic hair clemency, or worse, what if everyone suddenly decided full-grown women with pubic hair were very attractive?
Then where would she be? Buying pubic hair from strangers off the internet and gluing it all over her body?
In the nineties and aughts, thick eyebrows were considered foul, and everyone lined up to have theirs waxed off.
Fifteen years later, thin eyebrows were considered disgusting, and all the women who had spent years paying to have their eyebrows whittled down to matchsticks felt like ridiculous punch lines.
The worst part was, the damage to the hair follicle was done, and some of those women could not grow those matchsticks back to normal human eyebrows.
Rhea knew victims of the matchstick trend who had hair from their heads transplanted onto their eyebrows so they could again feel welcome in society.
Rhea was thankful she’d had the foresight to ignore the initial trend.
Throughout the aughts and tens, she’d left her eyebrows thick and natural, despite being toddler-smooth everywhere else.
Back then, she heard, “Girl, you have got to do something about those caterpillars.”
Now she heard, “Oh my God, I love your eyebrows so much, you’re so lucky.”
Which trends to ignore and which to follow? A question that kept her up at night.
Rhea picked up her phone but still could not make herself write him back.
She knew Danny was going through something, and she did not want to ignore it.
But so many times in the past, asking if someone was going through something had not gone well.
She was too observant and usually knew her boyfriends were upset before they did.
It took them several days to figure out they were going through something, and by the time they finally realized they had been upset, they were usually too annoyed about being asked if they were okay over and over again to remember what they had initially been upset about.
Growing up with an unpredictable mother gave Rhea a superpower.
She could read every little sigh or downward gaze like it was a crystal ball, accurately predicting any sudden change of mood and the yelling that might accompany it.
When exchanging text messages, her superpower allowed her to read a lack of punctuation or a delayed response time as tiny clues that something was amiss.
Her fingers hovered above the keys. She typed: I’m sensing something is going on with you. Am I way off?