Breasts

At some point I think we have probably all stood in front of the full-length mirror naked with only ourselves and done a full inspection of what the DNA from our conception has yielded.  Like most women, any time I’ve done this, I get hung up on my breasts.

It’s sort of ridiculous that they’re there in the first place, these mammory glands just suspended there in the middle of my chest.  They’re there even when I’m not in heat, when I’m not feeling particularly feminine.  They’re there though I never intend to have biological children.  They arrived when I was 14 and surpassed the size of my mother’s very quickly.  Then they grew larger than most of my friends and that’s around the time I stopped feeling unstoppable.  I could be stopped.  Breasts stopped me.

I taped them in college.  My boyfriend would laugh when we’d undress in his rowhouse but he never made fun of me.  He knew that was off-limits.  This is the one thing that wasn’t funny- this paranoia I felt that it was this, these over-sized breasts, that would keep me from ever being taken seriously.  Even when I realized no one should ever be taken seriously, I still hated them- the way they stretch out my clothing, the way they strain my back.

And then I came to Asia, where the vast majority of the women look like middle schoolers and white men from around the globe flock here for this very reason.  Even in the heat of the Philippines, I usually carry a jacket or a scarf and if I don’t have one, I carry my bag over my chest.  In this country without sexual harassment laws, my coworkers often comment that my breasts look exceptionally “dako” (large) or that I look very “tambok” (fat).  The disproportion makes it obvious what they’re talking about.  So I sweat extra through my layers and under my second bra.  

I go to the gym to try to lose weight in conspicuous areas but it’s painful because when I work out everyone is staring.  I hear the men saying they’ve never seen a woman so big.  It’s not rude because it’s the Philippines.  You can say what you want.  I just pretend I don’t know Visiya.  I stretch in the corner and go in the evenings when less people are around.

And when I come home I look in the mirror.  My body is covered with mosquito bites and my shoulders and nose are more freckled than ever.  My hair is frizzy from the humidity and my skin looks nice and smooth.  But my breasts are unchanged by the climate, the diet, by anything.  Ten years, and they still seem no more a part of me than when they first emerged.

Mindanever

The sun set in the cemetery at six o’clock and painted the stones hues of pink and orange.  And then they faded to blue.  The sun sets around six and rises about the same no matter the season.  There are no season really- hot and dry, hot and rainy.  Hot and dry is smellier, hot and rainy is dirtier.  Either way I am perpetually damp with sweat or raindrops.  Either way I find it impossible to mark time without changes of wardrobe and beverages.  Last month felt like it should have finally been Christmas, but it was already June and there hadn’t been a snowflake in sight.  

So no time has really passed since last summer.  I am still in a double bed on the second floor of a row house in Northeast- yellow streetlight coloring the sheets, staring at the paddle fan on the ceiling.  In many ways this is all just a dream, the people I’ve buried I never truly met, the creatures that died in my watch never existed in the first place.  In many ways I am already in the future, out the door, through a window staring at a winter storm with an American beer in hand.  In many ways I am wondering what the hell has happened to everything.  All of the houses seem too big and there is too much, just too much of everything.  

I made some coffee at 9 o’clock tonight, after we’d returned from the cemetery where we celebrated the birthday of a little girl who has been in the ground for a year and a half.  I think of how so many Westerns would consider this a morbid activity, all the while worshipping the gruesome exploitation of this girl’s relatives to fulfill their consumer-heavy quota.  I’m filled with sickness and anger.  I have not found a salve for my resentment as it pushes me to ends I’d rather not go.  The religion of the people is as rot with bitterness as capitalism is with indifference.  I have spent most of my ten month here praying at their temple.  

The home I’m lonely for no longer exists.  The winter I long for is disappearing from the earth.  There’s not a cemetery wide enough to hold our losses.

9 months

“Some must go nowhere before they can go anywhere”

My thoughts have turned to what (if anything) I’ve learned on Mindanao in the nine months I’ve been on this island.  As friends and family tell me to make sure I “bring myself home in one piece”, I grow to believe that there are pieces of me spread all over Mindanao- up the calichuchi trees and in the coral fragments, nestled in the tuber fields and floating on the waves of Lake Lanao.  I shed the layers when I slip in the water and sink in the mud- it’s a slow process.  Sometimes it hurts a little.

So what is being added?  What keeps this vessel afloat as the planks are removed from its underbelly in the face of a storm.  I’m not naive enough to believe it’s wisdom, or even intelligence or gumption.  Maybe it’s just mud and pineapples, maybe it’s just salt water and flowers.  I see the destruction of my emptiness like the coming of the rainy season.  The air grows dense and cool and then the atmosphere purges- cleansing the world again.

I stand in the rain.  I am 80 percent water.

Dragging on

On Sunday afternoon time wades lazily through the heat, not wanting to build a sweat from the darkened cinema where I watched a matinee to the air-conditioned coffee house where I’m reading about Philippine mining exploitation.  The hives on my face, circle my eyes like rosettes, my tear ducts irrigate via premature crow’s feet.  Crow’s feet.  I didn’t notice them before the tropical allergies first visited my complexion, but now there they are under the puffiness- the beginnings of middle-age. 

Twenty-four hit me last month, dressed in drag, singing karaoke.  All of the activists had turned out for Pojas’s funeral the day before, and by Saturday (the day of the party) he was still dead.  The unpredictability of the life of a militant easily melded to a post-life as dull as everyone else’s.  Certainly Pojas’s being gunned down right outside of his office added a certain remarkablity to the dying, but afterwards he was only just as dead, not any more or less so.  That was the crime on the part of whatever agent ordered his death- that Celso Pojas would still be just as dead five weeks, five months, and fives years after they found him slumped by the gate in Ma-a, Davao City.

I ordered the beers in Visisya and wore a satin tie under a military jacket.  My boss showed up dressed as a woman and his wife like a lesbian (for some the drag only goes so far).  I spent US$ 75 feeding and liquoring my coworkers/friends, an unprecedented amount of money in a country where $1.50 buys a cab across town.  Sometime between that night and May of last year a thousand years had passed.  In the next thousand, Celso Pojas will always be dead.

www.justiceforcelso.wordpress.com

Safeguard

Seven thousand miles away and more than a year after both of them have been in the ground, I found my grandparents in a tiny first floor bathroom in Davao City.  My dad’s parents- they lived what seemed like so far away.  But I never lacked grandparenting.  My brother and I were the only two kids on our part of the block, so there were also people that age around; older folks whose children moved out, just ready to spoil us.  My mom’s mom lived right down the road, too, so maybe I did get spoiled.  I didn’t realize how special cross-generation relationship are, I didn’t really think about any of it.  And now, these people (our family’s friends and makeshift guardians) are starting to die.  My grandparents just got in early.

So I wasn’t thinking about them yesterday when I took the new bar of soap from the bathroom sink.  When I  went back to my computer to write on in my endless parade of words, they hadn’t crossed my mind.  But then when I covered my mouth to stifle a yawn, there they were.  I breathed in a different time from my hands, a different first floor, a world away.  In my grandparents’ bathroom they had a flowery wash on the sink, but the air always smelled of something else- presumably the soap in the shower.  

I got up from my desk and went back down the hall to the bathroom.  I looked at the box.  Turns out, Gram and Pap used Safeguard.  

Now I’m here and they’re both dead, but this still smells the very same.  It smells like the one time we slept over night at their house in Braddock and I’d forgotten my toothbrush.  It smells like when they moved to North Versailles, like the shed in the back where Pap promised us a sleep out.  Like the tree we climbed that was covered with Daddy Longlegs, like the picnic table I painted in the driveway, like the hands that poured the soda and embraced my father.  My dad, a full grown man with kids of his own, but my grandpa never failed to kiss and hug him goodbye.  It smells like when they finally came to my last recital, like when I learned Braddock was never really far away.  Like the time I was stuck at college and I knew what was coming.  Like a tube in her throat and needles in her arms.  Like when my Dad said, “Don’t bother coming home” and I didn’t but I should have.  Like drinking in New York City- Rolling Rock, the beer for when you fail.

So I learned something about my grandparents, God rest their souls.  We all took turns letting each other down, but now they’re dead and yet here they are- in my bathroom.  And still, I have nothing, got nothing at all.  By the time I’d grown, I’d forgotten what to say.  That sort of runs in the family.

Far from home

Chain smoking and cheap beer take me further from home.  Months have turned into years into a place without apple pies and pea coats.  I’ve only missed snow for one season but I nearly cried when describing it to some Filipinos at a bar on Saturday.

How can we speak of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman without feeling New England?  The rocky coast, the wind whipping through Boston on the wings of ice.  I remember the night I slept in a cabin named for the Walden writer.  I remember curling up against the cold in a sleeping bag, terrified of bears outside and heartache within.  It felt right come 5am when we wondered out in boots and caps to see the sun blend into the water.  If a reader could ever kiss Throeau it would be there; in his home, in his essence, the smell of pine cleansing the air.

America, stop hurting me.  I love you.

Keeping Quilt- from last June

A keeping quilt to keep and kill, to wrap around you in the darkest moments and to warm you with a woman’s love. I kept you in my heart so we could bind ourselves together. Our keeping quilt was a hooded sweatshirt- it had holes in the sleeves and patches on the arms and reeked of pot and cigarettes. And I would wrap you in it and hold you close, in the remnants of the bathroom light that crept through the cracked bedroom door. Your prodigy fingers caressed the back of my hand and I told you we’d always be together.

The killing fields were behind your house, were on the border of an abandoned Amish farm. And men rode by in their hats and beards, the clicking of the hooves and the pounding of your chest ringing in my frozen ears. November was cold but your body was warm, hot underneath your wool skirt and sweater. Your school seal covering your right breast, I lined up little deaths for you on the border of your father’s land- your mouth open, your lips parted, perhaps you took that moment to forget your Bible. Perhaps you took that moment to damn us both to hell. Your father damned me, he lined up a great death the first time he met me. He did the killing in a simple way, taking what was his, stealing what was ours. The wizzing of his Chevy tires on the fresh blacktop, the clicking of his truck on your asphalt driveway. Trucks do not click like hooves- your heart beat in panic, not ecstasy.

I stumbled off from the massacre morally wounded, a heavy load in my knapsack and your sweater on my back. The distance grew longer in the dark and my betrayal was perhaps the greatest death of all. I died on the road to the Lancaster Bus Depot, your father killed us in the house with his scripture.

The keeping quilt came on your wedding day, in a pure white box with a silk ribbon- the first time I’ve ever seen your mother happy. The killing field was the altar where you swore your love and purity and you denied everything we were for years before. Your keeping quilt will keep you safe and keep them blind and your children happy. Your keeping quilt will keep me and us away.

The night I almost

The night I almost stepped on the moon, it was just perched on the edge of the abyss. The stars had come down to meet the mountains and I couldn’t tell where the earth ended and the cosmos began.

“Esai,” a firefly spoke, or didn’t speak or barely said. The bonfires around us were just as bright, the native children leaping over them like planets orbiting a star. I waited my turn and breathed my air, knowing that some turns never come to pass and no one can own the atmosphere. We rolled cigarettes in newspaper and confused Austen with Tolstoy; dreams of the future were sacrificed for a chance of living forever.

Drumbeats covered Talaingod, absorbed by the earth, reflected by the moon. The drumbeats said, Mindanao and the croaking frogs said, we’re leaving you. I begged to stay with every glance and the natives smiled and kissed me goodbye. The moon was so bright, I really couldn’t have missed it but my eyes were closed when I danced off the earth. “Esai,” it spoke. And I watched my step.

“I’m not your planet. Don’t step on me.”

 

Great Wall of Chaingmai

I broke my crown when I fell off the great wall of Chaingmai. A missionary shouldn’t be wearing a crown, in fact I didn’t think I was. I didn’t notice it until I hit the ground and heard it clatter on the cement behind me.

Thailand was just too much of who I am- too much white, too much money, loud and boisterous, demanding demanding. When I go home, if I go home, that’s who I was and who I am. It’s okay there. And it’s not okay that it’s okay because there is no need inside all of that wanting. The needing is still there, but it’s for affection and touch; touch we push away.

In the Chaingmai temple, the energy seized me: It strangled me as I sat at the feet of the meditating Buddha. I turned my own feet away. I turned them away and I hid my face. I hid from everything that was in the darkness, and in the hiding I opened myself. If this is a foreign idol, I will not bow down. I will not surrender to what is unclean. But what is this peace, what is this power? Truly, truly this is the peace I wanted- peace that fills emptiness, that releases the valve that suffocates my heart. What is this wanting? This waiting. Then my soul was empty, empty of even the emptiness. I was staring into the eyes of the meditating Buddha. He did not see me and I didn’t see me either. I just saw the great wall. The great wall that keeps me from where I’m going and keeps me in who I am.

I wandered out of the hall and into the courtyard. My feet moved like the unmoved and I was brought low at the thought of the Creator. The God of Chaingmai held me steady and strong, the grip tight on my mind as the song filled my ears. It was a quiet song, low and lonely, whispering for what we all lost when the white people came to Asia; when I came to Asia and tried to make it my own. Chaingmai is not for me, none of this is for me. It’s more of what we’ve taken. I will not be the one to seize it.

I stepped away from the wall and begin the aerial descent. It was dark and deep and full of the love I’ve given away, never to feel again. It’s saturated with who I wasn’t and couldn’t have been, but who I wanted to be in every dream and in every reality. And that’s what I lost in Chaingmai. Falling from a wall, great or not, is all about letting go. Loss of selfishness is the path to nirvana. Loss of self is the path to Christ.

“It was more beautiful up there in the temple,” I said, getting up from the cement on which I’d landed.  ”And I was more beautiful in my dreams.” I looked into the dark where my crown had rolled away

A history

At six weeks old I was baptized with the name Virginia and my soul was saved from hell. At six-years-old I redamned myself by asking my mother “What if God doesn’t exist?”

“He does,” she said. I still think this is an unsatisfactory answer for a Christian of any age.

My religious formation started early. While my brother and my friends were goofing off in Catechism, I was hanging on every word. Everything I need to know in life, I learned from Sister Grace Marie:
Every time you sin, you alone nail Jesus back to the cross. (I lamented all through the day that I had failed to make my bed that morning.) Dogs don’t go to heaven- God only saves people. (My dad said Sister Grace was not only wrong, but frigid. He was still a Methodist then.) Jews may or may not go to heaven, but that’s not your concern. The crucifixion really, really hurt. Holy Eucharist is the greatest gift Christ gave us. Your non-Catholic friends can’t take it.

The time I was most afraid of my father was in eighth grade when I got in a fight with him about why I was being so moody. I went to a convent that weekend with some of friends to do community service. There, I got my first beer. One of my friends attacked me for what seemed like no reason. Years later I found out her father sexually abused her. I’ve never figured out what to say.

I read my first National Geographic later that year, specifically a story about nomadic shepherds and camel herders in India. “A dying community” the article said, “the local church is trying to help them keep their livelihood.”

“I want to be a missionary,” I told my mom.
“I thought you wanted to be a doctor,” she replied and handed me the dishes to set the table. It’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re wearing tie-dye in 1997.

I fell in love my last year of high school. I saw God in every mile the Greyhound bus traveled to Lancaster. I felt like I understood Psalms. A man I’d defended wrongfully died on Orthodox Christmas that year. I felt like I understood Isaiah.

God’s come in many forms since then. He fell like an angel out of the sky while I was doing data entry in an office on H Street. “Was that a bird?” I said to a coworker. I stood up and peeked out the window. The jumper lay in the alley for hours while the police analyzed the crime scene. I was 18 and had not gone home for the summer. I could not look away.

God is a black woman who was locked up for using crack. While in the slammer, she became a dealer. We called her Ma Belle and she was the kindest soul I’ve ever met. God is a white man who got addicted to heroine in Vietnam. He lived in a box outside my building and we went to McDonald’s together. The day the big hurricane came to Washington I couldn’t find him anywhere and I haven’t seen him since. I called him Doc but never knew his real name.

God was in the bear at the Russian carnival. Chained to a pole, the bear was beaten with reeds until he performed tricks. I also saw people beat him for fun. I hope by now the bear has died. And God is the 14-year-old stripper at a nightclub in Moscow. The bartender told the marine she would show him a good time. The marine paid up and led the girl to the back. If God did not damn Lot for offering his virgin daughters to the mob, will God damn a US Marine? And if he damns even one person, do I have a chance of salvation?

Salvation was my own apartment in Glover Park, was my dog coming to live with me and sleeping next to me in bed. If sin was listening to “Songbird” with my 25-years-older boyfriend, redemption was loving a dog. And then a person, and then people. And then maybe, just maybe myself. Loving is hard. You have to start small or it’s just impossible.

Sixteen years after I damned myself, I tried to save my soul. “Do I exist?” I asked the bathroom mirror as I studied the blue in my eyes.

“You do,” it replied. An unsatisfactory answer, yes, but part of life has been learning to take some things at face value.