Letters to My Body Parts: Butt

Dear My Butt,

I know we don’t often speak personally like this. Ours is a relationship between gentlemen: we coexist, we do our jobs, and we rarely talk. However, I must tell you how much I appreciate what you do for me. Day after day, there you are: protecting my tender bits and raw bones from hours and hours of being crushed by my upper-body weight. Sofas, hard floors, dirty ground, grass, concrete, my bicycle saddle, and never forget the office chair. Ah, the office chair. If it weren’t for you, Mr. Butt, I would have the synthetic fabric pattern of this chair permanently impressed into my colon. But there you are.

We are men of inaction; lies do not become us. You and I both know you are more corpulent than you have been in the past. I take full responsibility for this. Instead of climbing glaciers and swimming ocean swells, I have been overusing you, in this chair and others, for decades. And I have eaten — oh, how I have eaten! Despite all this, you valiantly work nearly every day to expel as much of my gluttony as you can. But Mr. Stomach and the Intestine Brothers do their jobs too well, and my fat layer grows. And still, under even these circumstances, you manage to grow only in proportion to the rest of me, always perfectly sized to cushion my increasing bulk.

I know you get sore from being sat on. I know you occasionally suffer other maladies brought on by my occasional unwise eating choices. I’m truly sorry for this. Please accept my sincere apologies, and I ask you to remember what we’ve gone through together, especially the two years in Mexico. You remember the two or three weeks of salmonella/typhoid/whatever? Do you remember the horrible “restroom” we spent so many of those days in? The outhouse on the hillside, with crumbling walls and no roof? I certainly do, and you were there with me through all of it. You’re a trooper.

Thank you for doing what you do,

Me.