Opportunity 2

Writing featured in Opportunity - Issue 2

My bra is too tight

My bra is too tight.

When I say you wouldn’t understand, it’s because I need your full attention. No swallowing, no acceptance.

This isn’t your body, and this isn’t your brain.

My bra is too tight.

It’s the expectation, it’s soaking in cool, stagnant water. It’s conversation-ending.

It’s a definition found through a search engine. It’s just a feeling, and someone always knows better.

The weight is on my shoulders, and it is on my chest. It is hanging, wobbling, throbbing - heavy pendulums swinging off of my paper-thin skin. It is the world’s water flowing through plush, healthy veins, pressing, close to the surface and begging for air. It is too tight.

Have you envisioned paradise?

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Two clear, hard plastic tubes siphoning warm, viscous milk up and out, to be disposed of.

Using a stone chisel and mallet to fucking dig out the parasite strapped to my sternum.

I am not a supporting character of the 1999 hit film Alien.

I am not your mother. I am not your girl. I am not “giiiiirrrrrrl”.... I am not.

I am grey, amorphous, I am heavy smog.

I am ruining your perfect day.

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How can something that sags, stretching violently to the floor, grip me so tightly? How can this soggy, wet sack of dirt, balled up in a Queen-size bedsheet, dragging mercilessly behind me... be what defines me?

Who am I? I am stuck, trapped, between the waistband of this cheap Hanes sports bra and my imprinted and irritated rib cage. I am buckled in and sitting down, but I cannot take a deep breath.

I ask for the second time this hour if the hostess could check on my take-out order.

I am having a hard time breathing. I think my bra is too tight.