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.

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.

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.

If April showers bring genderfication, what does genderfication bring?

In this neighborhood
the rain doesn’t cleanse, it just
moves the filth around.

Out like a lamb

It’s a sad thing, when a dog dies. Because a dog, while “less than a human”, is somehow more than a person, greater than its master and the sum of its antics. A dog means more to its master than it can know. A dog only knows it’s a dog. Its master knows a dog is also an idea. The dog rolls in dirt and licks itself, wrecks the furniture and tracks in mud. But the idea reminds us that not everything is fallen, not all of God’s creation has failed him. The dog, in fact, may have surprised its creator, may have made God question what “in one’s own image” means. God may have a moral center, may be able to judge between right and wrong, but if He is truly (and I believe he is) solely about love, than it is the dog, and not the man, that best reflects the divine.

My dad brought home this dog when I was 10. I named her after a cartoon character. She peed on the rug, scratched on the doors, and pretty much made everything right in the home. Odie was a solace to my father when his children went through puberty and a comfort to my mother when we moved out of the house. And when she stopped eating and starting going in the house again, we all feared the worst. Right before she turned 13, it was time to put her down.

“We have to do the right thing,” my mother said. “We have to put her down.”

“Put her down” is a softer way of saying euthanize, which is a softer way of saying “it’s time for you to die.” My parents were there in the room; my dad holding her as the injection went in, my crying mother kissing her face. The doctor said it only took half the dose, half a shot and she was gone .

“This dog was ready to go,” I imagine him saying. I see my mother clinging to my father, who is turning his face away in grief.

The vet put her down and sent her on. She was tired and ready and looking ahead and went out like a lamb in a wintry April, not a whimper or sigh, just a close of her eyes. Out like a lamb to the realm of ideas, to where God keeps his unfallen creation- a Garden of Eden with sofas and rawhide. I suspect a God of eternity will take time to scratch her under the chin.

Back at home where my dad first brought the dog, he’s buried her body out back by the trees. So she’ll sleep close by under his watchful gaze, under a bouquet of flowers he laid while weeping. It’s a sad thing, to lose a dog. A dog is what we could be if we were carefree with ourselves and more careful with others. If we were unafraid of both living and dying of loving and losing and mostly of not knowing.

Unfallen and loyal, putrid but beautiful- I will miss the dog almost, but not quite, as much as I love her.

Apes out of Eden

We loped into Eden as animals, knowing our place and our world, knowing God in our very sense of being. We ambled into Eden with our opposable thumbs and our bellies growling, with a sense of entitlement only existing in terms of survival. We migrated into Eden as one, as a united front that lived to pass on what we’d learned, our evolution crawling over a hundred thousand years.

And when we got comfortable in this garden that gave us so much aplenty, when there was time for thought and ideas and fire (for God’s sake fire!) that’s when we finally diversified our selves, our race. We wandered into Eden with our heads in the dirt and we fell in Eden when we turned our heads to the sky. There is no turning back from knowledge. Eden was bountiful but unforgiving.

“It’s not us, it’s them,” we shout to the stars, barely able to hear our voices over the blasts. We rain fire on Eden to weed out the terrorists. We cut down the Tree to make room for development. We orphan the children in the Cradle of Life then pride ourselves in giving them charity. And when we’re done, we take pictures and film documentaries and bury our mistakes in the sand.

We ride out of Eden in tanks and planes, knowing our place in the world, knowing God in the way we’ve named him. We march out of Eden standing upright with our bellies full, with a sense of entitlement that comes from being as God intended. We migrate out of Eden as many, as countries that exist to push our agendas, our regression so fast that we could annihilate ourselves in the next hundred years.

In like a lion

Like a lion he calls his children to the East and like a lamb I will follow, head down, stepping slowly, afraid of what’s to come. Is this as close to certainty as we can get, happiness in an overwhelming decision?

She steps out of the darkness and shrugs off the winter of her fears. It’s been so long since she’s faced anything but uncertainty and now fulfillment is no different. Reality continues to be uncompassionately thin.

20 years

Before you knew I was coming, you were preparing a place for me, for this second-born with her feet in the ocean and her head in the dirt.

My mother knew I was coming, felt me stirring inside of her, torturing her before I’d even taken a breath. Later on she would buy me women’s clothes, trying to tempt me back to Christian sanity with promises of a new wardrobe. I remember standing in front of her in my bedroom in my boy’s pants and undershirt, I remember both of our hearts breaking at the same moment as she saw who I was and I saw what she hated.

“Girls don’t hug other girls like that,” she whispered one day, afraid that the walls would report this indiscretion to my father.
“Like what?” I asked, my face heating up.
“Like that. They just don’t,” she said.

Years later, I told her that I’d fallen in love. I thought she already knew, that she’d understood from stories and poems I’d written in the year before, that this person I’d been running to visit at every moment was more then a pen pal or a roommate.
“What have we done wrong?” she asked, weeping over her appetizer.
“Nothing. There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said.
She was silent.
“There isn’t,” I insisted.
She dabbed her eye.
“Is there?” I asked.

Before you knew I was coming, you said no. “No,” you said, “there is nothing wrong with what you wear, who you love, who you are.” And for this, I am grateful. It is a hard thing after all, to be wrong just by being.