The Bloodletting

        Historically, marketing emphasized the material qualities of a product—its specifications, functions, and practical benefits. Over time, however, advertising evolved toward the production of symbolic value, positioning commodities not merely as useful objects but as vehicles through which consumers might perform identity, autonomy, status, and self-actualization. The emergence of targeted advertising represents a further epistemological shift in the relationship between commerce and subjectivity. Rather than simply responding to preexisting desires, algorithmic advertising increasingly identifies, cultivates, and monetizes latent insecurities, rendering the individual both consumer and product within an ever-expanding digital marketplace of self-optimization. This essay seeks to interrogate the implications of this paradigm while situating the contemporary body as a contested site of neoliberal commodification.

Just kidding. 

I have been getting a lot of ads targeting my breast shape lately, and I'm unsure how "they" even know this information about me.

"They."

Who are they?

Big shrug.

Big money.

The Man.

They know far more about me than I know about them.

I have big ol' floppy tits. As my mother had before me, and her mother before her. And probably all the way back to my ancestors in Germany, hauling kegs of beer around a tavern—or so I imagine them.

Yet the internet knows this about me.

I looked at my photos on Instagram. They couldn't possibly have figured this out from my pictures. I generally point the camera at my face. I have never Googled my breast shape.

Why there are loads of breasts in this world. There are flatty-flats and roundy-rounds and perky-perks and lopsy-sides. A million kinds of tits for a million kinds of women, and they are all pretty. 

Including mine. 

And apparently the internet knows exactly what they look like.

Well, thanks to targeted ads, I have been informed that I have "teardrop boobs."

Until last week, I had never heard of this. But now, thank you, marketing executives, I know that "teardrop boobs" are not only what these—imagine I'm motioning to my chest—are called, but that they are apparently a terrible condition which can and should be addressed.

What I find most troubling about this recent influx of "fix your shit tits" ads is that last month, I took a few minutes each day to rub lotion lovingly onto my chest and, in my head, tell my breasts that they are beautiful and wonderful and that I love them.

Do you think my phone was listening to all that?

Listening to my daily tit affirmations?

Did they think I was like a little kid whispering to myself, "It's okay," because she felt ashamed—and not because I actually like the big ol' floppy flops of my matriarchal lineage?

Because now it is shoveling five kinds of bras, a chest binder, breast reduction surgery, breast lift surgery, a supplement to "drain toxins from the lymph nodes in breast tissue" made from some sort of deep-sea algae, and a dress that lifts the tits.

Oh, free consultation!

Fifteen percent off when you sign up for the newsletter!

Decreased sagging in just two weeks!

Never feel ashamed of your sad, sad teardrop boobs again!

So sad they're even called teardrops.

Aren't you crying yet, girlie?

Not yet, bruh.

The other day, I was in the bath, my floppies just floating and flopping, as they do, in the water. Swaying sweetly with the motion of the warm water. And they weren't teardrops at all. They were round little buoys, bouncing and playing like dolphins in the ocean. It was delightful. Press them down and they'd bob back up to the surface.

Hello! 

Hello!

Ahoy, matey!

Then I dried myself off and saw droplets of blood all over the tile floor. Then streaks of blood on my feet and calves. I leaned down to clean it up, and there was blood smeared all over my left breast—the slightly smaller one. I tried to clean it up and find the source, but as I did, it only seemed to get worse.

Finally, I found the tiny, minuscule nick on my thigh, just above my knee, from shaving.

How so much poured out of my body through such a small hole, I don't know.

But I dabbed a little toilet paper on it.

Stopped it up.

And as I cleaned the mess, I thought about how much of my DNA—those same little nucleotides that made my tits, and my mother's, and her mother's before her—was now still on the floor. 

Just traces, of course. 

Like a crime scene after the cleanup.

Just enough left behind to tell someone exactly who had been there.

Enough to break the whole case wide open.

Funny, isn't it?

How a detective can reconstruct a life from a drop of blood, while an algorithm seems determined to reconstruct an insecurity from a body.

I'm sure this week I'll get a billion ads for safety razors and creams and lotions and products to prevent nicks and get a closer, smoother shave. Maybe wax. Maybe Nair. Maybe some other product to address the terrible condition of growing hair like the ape I am instead of the mannequin I could become with enough money and enough time.

And you know what?

It didn't need fixing.

It never needed fixing.

But Then There's Me

So, my husband should be going out of town next week. This will be only the third time in our nine-year relationship that we will have been apart overnight.

The first was in December 2016. I went to Florida solo to visit my mom, grandma, and aunt—all of whom are dead now, in that order.

Which feels impossible when I write it that way. At the time, they were simply people I was going to see.

It was very early in our relationship, before we were married. We had been living together for less than two months. It was easy on both of us.

Then, in October 2024, he went to Indiana to look at a house. It was only a few days, and I had work, which I did from home each day. I cleaned the oven, cleaned the whole house, watched the entire first season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, watched Room and Saltburn, baked cookies, and talked to him on the phone three to five times a day.

In some ways, it was kind of fun.

So, at the prospect of my husband being out of town next week for a few days, I figured it would be the same.

But next week, Juneteenth—a day I have off from work—falls during his trip. I didn't realize this until after all the plans were made: tickets bought, car reserved, hotel booked.

Why does one day—no work, no husband—hold some sort of newness that I'm examining yet can't quite explain?

In my first marriage, to a totally different guy, I was alone a lot. I was on my own a lot. There were months when he didn't step foot into the apartment where we lived, and I saw him only a few days a week. In many regards, it was as if I wasn't married at all.

I was married, but I didn't share my life with him, and he did not share a life with me. We were coexisting in the way coworkers might sometimes see each other in meetings, make small talk, help out on a project, then disappear back into their own tasks completely separate from one another.

What do they even do on a daily basis?

We don't really know.

It's only the overlap we see and feel and know.

But this marriage has been different. From the start, we wove our lives together into one. The minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks—it is intrinsically linked. We have time apart, hours here and there. We have separate hobbies, hours here and there. But even apart, there's this line of communication: texts when we get there, when we leave, check-ins, do you need anything, do you want a Coke from the gas station?

Perhaps it's the solitude, quietness, the realization of how noisy my life is.
How full.

Of course, there is the background noise: another person with whom I share my home, moving from room to room, working, taking phone calls with colleagues, watching TV.

But then there's me.

When all that external noise falls away, I fill it with podcasts, TV, YouTube, music, voice messages to friends. I am always filling the void.

I keep picturing ten o'clock on that Friday morning.

No meetings?

No husband in the next room?

No agenda?

Just coffee growing cold somewhere in the house and no particular reason to be anywhere.

Just open-ended moments.

Just who I am when nobody needs anything from me.

Who I am when nobody even wants anything from me.

My mother is gone.

My grandmother is gone.

My aunt is gone.

The first time we spent a night apart, they were all still here.

And, for now, my husband is simply my husband. In the next room. Going on a road trip. Mowing the grass. Stopping at the gas station.

Footsteps echoing from the other side of the house.

But a thirty-six-year age gap has a way of making the future feel less hypothetical.

Maybe that's what feels so strange about next Friday.

Not that he will be gone temporarily.

That someday he will truly be gone forever.

For one quiet Friday, I find myself staring at the smallest possible version of that reality.

No work. No husband. Just me.

Maybe that's what feels so strange about the whole thing.

Not being alone, but remembering I will eventually have to re-learn how.

The Unicorn in the Garden: Fifty-Four Dollars of Memory

Sunday, May 11, 7:38 p.m., text message from Aunt Becky:

"Hi. And happy fur Mother’s Day. I went up to New York City yesterday for a performance. I found a couple of things for you that reminded me of your mother. I also got a $35 henna tattoo."

Me:

"It’s so thoughtful of you to send me something that reminds you of my mom. I’m sure you feel it too—Mother’s Day gets a little weird after your mom’s gone."

Her:

"Yep, it’s weird. And so is Father’s Day when they’re gone—and not having kids to be their mom or have a father person."

She says “fur Mother’s Day” because we’re both childless adult orphans, my aunt and I. But we have cats. The last two Kleins—even if, through marriage, we now have different last names. We orbit each other—tentative, awkward—desperate to connect, and scared to be rejected.

Her trip to the Met on Mother’s Day felt significant. I’ve never been—to the Met or to New York. Certainly not on Mother’s Day.

When her package of mother-relics arrived, I opened it slowly, uncertain of what grief might feel like in bubble wrap. Inside: a mouse pad, an enamel pin, and a greeting card with delicate quilling. Each featured The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, one of the Unicorn Tapestries. The price tags were still on, which meant I knew exactly what it cost her to remember my mother and share those memories with me: fifty-four dollars.

I sent a quick thank-you text. She replied, “It was ironic that I was at The Cloisters on Mother’s Day.”

I had to Google The Cloisters... and then, just to be sure, “ironic.” I texted back, “It was!”—even though I wasn’t convinced it really was. The museum was open, and she was there by choice. Seeing medieval art on Mother’s Day didn’t seem any more ironic than me watching Beavis and Butt-Head that same morning.

Still, something about it struck an angelic chord. Maybe it was the effort. Maybe it was the gesture. Maybe it was simply that someone remembered.

And the things she sent—they felt like my mother. But not the version I knew as an adult. They brought back the woman I vaguely remember as a child. Maybe even the one my aunt knew better: before the bitterness, before the disappointment. A mother who still collected unicorns. Who still believed in magic. A woman who vanished long before she actually died.

That version of my mother is someone I’ve come to grieve in pieces. Unlike Aunt Becky, I have no such relics to offer her—nothing of her mother’s, or even of her. My own mother made sure of that. She spent decades keeping both my aunt and grandmother out of our lives. I was left with only a few cryptic explanations, scattered like breadcrumbs by a wounded, vengeful woman to a trusting, hungry child. They didn’t make sense then. They still don’t.

And yet, I still find myself trying to make sense of it. Maybe family is just complicated. Maybe, as an only child, I’ll never fully grasp the tangled roots of sibling rivalry. My successful aunt—a towering figure—against my struggling single mom.

Or maybe it was more personal: the college boyfriend my mom slept with. The husband she cheered when he got another woman—not my aunt—pregnant. The petty, private feuds that bloomed into lifelong rifts.

I’ll never know the full truth, and maybe that’s the inheritance: an unsolvable puzzle. Still, for all the silence and suspicion, this same aunt—estranged, distant—might have known my mother better than I ever could.

What I do know is this: my mother never went to the Met. Never visited The Cloisters. Never saw the Unicorn Tapestries. Not on Mother’s Day. Not on any day. And she didn’t have $54 to spend in any gift shop. She was not like Aunt Becky.

So what becomes of the unrealized dreams of the dead? Do they linger in the spaces they leave behind?

No. They live in the mess of the living who remain.

They become a mouse pad on my desk.

An enamel pin on my corkboard.

A card too beautiful to send.

A package sent across a silent rift,

a thank-you to an aunt
my mother vowed never to speak to again.

Maybe that’s ironic.

Or maybe it’s just one of grief’s stranger tricks: the only way left to commune with my mother is through the person she tried so hard to erase.

Her legacy lives in me, but only if I tear down what she built to keep others out. And perhaps—though I barely dare say it—I’m starting to admire Aunt Becky. She’s reaching out—in the quiet, in the after—when my mother never did.

Perhaps, someday, I will be at The Cloisters on Mother's Day.
Wouldn't that be ironic?