The Giver and the Gifts

From the beginning, when my breasts first began to bud--that was my true beginning --men accepted my offer of them, pleased to receive such gifts.

My admirers, admiring them, circled their soft, tender areolas with the tips of their forefingers, as delicately as though they were outlining the circle of an angel's halo. They pressed their lips to their nipples, as if my breasts were mouths to be kissed, and, oh! how my nipples responded, swelling and stiffening, to stand erect! Men squeezed them in their hard, calloused hands, as if they were fruits from a tree whose ripeness they'd thus determine. They spoke, softly and reverently, of their blessed attributes, calling them, in whispery, trembling voices, "rosy" and "full" and "firm" and "high" and "round." One fool, more romantic or lovelorn than the rest, called them "twin mountains of paradise."

I still giggled at such expressions--and the cruelty of my reply. "They're tits," I'd say. "Nothing more. Just tits."

In reality, I knew, my breasts were--and are--magnificent. They're splendid. Words don't describe them, could not describe them, no matter how poetic or elegant the language used--or, at least, words could not describe them well, any more than the word "apple" describes the fruit to which it refers or "cunt" captures the beauty and the mystery of a woman's deepest, most feminine parts.

My breasts may be, as many a lover has told me, "high" and "round" and "soft" and "firm," and they are "sleek" and "smooth" and "like the touch of the budding rose against one's cheek." I laugh at this line; it came from a poet among my many suitors--a bright, intense, sympathetic soul who wasn't half as good in bed as he was with words. His clumsiness as a lover--or, rather, as a would-be lover--amuses me, as, at the time we'd been a couple, it had frustrated and annoyed me. I'd thought, many a time, of saying to him the exact words that Eliza Doolittle, in My Fair Lady, says to Freddy Eysnford-Hill: "Don't say another word! Show me!"