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.