Poetry and all that jazz
Sometimes I am very aware of my breasts. At the occasional glance down at the moderate swell under my shirt I think: they are so obvious; everyone must be staring at them. I don’t look at other people’s breasts, unless they’ve made a point of ensuring that I do, in which case it makes me even more aware of my own breasts,which are not, I don’t think, very extraordinary, but merely some extraneous body part I’ve had since I was twelve.
If nothing else they remind me that I’m a woman, but in the same way they are mostly unattained fulfilment, because surely what use are they without a child to feed? And I wonder about, whether if people stop breast-feeding their babies, we might evolve one day to get born without breast tissue, though I suppose that would mean we weren’t mammals any more and it would cause an existential quandary.
So for now anyway, my breasts are useless, like my appendix, like my little toe and my wisdom teeth, they don’t do anything, just hang around waiting for the time there’ll be a point to them. And sometimes I think, I’m risking my life by carrying these things around, because breast cancer is the second most common cancer after lung cancer (except I can’t really live without my lungs) and breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, so really I’m walking around with two blobs of potential cancer on my chest.
It seems marvellous when you think about it, that all us women risk so much for the sake of looking attractive or for the sake of eventually being able to feed our babies. I’ve never heard of someone cutting off their breasts after they have enough babies to be potentially safe from the most common cancer in women, even though we get our wisdom teeth taken out to stop them getting infected and our appendix taken out to stop it exploding and going septic.
By now people are starting to wonder why I'm staring at my own breasts.
"Happiness," he says, "is just a construction."
I would look at him like he has lost his mind
But he says stuff like this all the time.
"What do you mean?
"I mean sociecy tells us what we want
and if we don't have it, we'll be unhappy," he says.
I say, "So what? Aren't we society?
Society knows what we want because we want it."
"Society is a construction, see?"
he says, looking at me,
Like he's the bloody world and I'm his listening board.