It isn’t what you think. I am not talking about mine here, people. You see I was on the tube the other day contemplating the meaning of life (which is what I almost always do when I ride the tube alone for any period of time) when a big — very big — middle-aged woman dressed in a large-print floral blouse and tan trousers bustled into my car and grabbed the pole just above my seat.

I looked up at her. She was about six feet tall and had an enormous bosom. In fact, her boobs resembled loaded weapons and they were pointed right at me. That’s right, classic torpedo tits. It was somewhat disconcerting and then the thought popped into my mind that it would be funny to take a picture of the enormous pointy bosoms with my iPhone.

I spent a short amount of time trying to position the phone so that it would not be obvious that I was attempting to capture an image of this lady’s gazongas and then, naturally, I came to my senses and didn’t do it. I mean it would have been pretty hard to pull it off and make it look like I was just fucking around with my email or something. I was worried that if she noticed she might sit on me or knock me over with one of those mamas.

Then I had a second thought (I often have two or more in the same day!) and that was how I wished to hell all the people who have ever told me to just not think about boobs, cancer or boob cancer could have been there to see these suckers bearing down on me. Oh sure, I thought. I just won’t think about tits, even when there are two boulders hanging over me that would have impressed even Sisyphus.

I thought again about taking a picture just so I could post it (with the face hidden of course, I am not a mean person — well I am not that mean and I don’t want to get sued or beaten up) just so I could post it on my blog and show people why it is sometimes hard not to be reminded of breast-related issues. But then a seat opened up across the way and she heaved herself, along with her bosoms, into it. And that was that, so…

I have many times revisited the question whether I miss my old boobs. When I wrote Boob Retrospective over one year ago, the honest and immediate answer was that no, I did not. This, because foremost in my mind was that my old boobs were planning to kill me off and they had therefore ventured over to the Dark Side.

But now that I have more perspective on my retrospective, I must admit that I have been missing them quite a bit (well, their precancerous iterations, anyhow) indeed. Sometimes I look at old pictures of myself and focus longingly on the more generous, soft shape that once graced my torso. And I admire bosoms on other people, for instance when they are bouncing around in the gym or jiggling down the street.

These are not thoughts that keep me up at night. I will get on without them. (What choice do I have anyway?) But it is too bad that they were taken away so soon. It has caused me to see myself differently. Angelina Jolie may have written that she doesn’t feel like any less of a woman with her new bionic tits. But I don’t know. Boobs are so symbolic of both motherhood and sexuality. And I definitely feel like less of myself to some extent. Perhaps this is because I never was and am still not an A-list Hollywood movie star married to another A-list Hollywood movie star and didn’t have the luxury, if you can call it that, of sparing the bits on the outside that make boobs look like real boobs.

I think I have noticed that men don’t check me out as much as they used to. And it does make it easier to deal with that I am not on the market and that my long-suffering husband is both present and understanding. But it must be hard for him, as well. I am sure he misses the things that I miss.

Perhaps some day they will figure out how to grow fat cells in a petri dish and can cultivate a couple of real doozies for me. Or I could eat a lot of chips and get a fat tummy so that we can upgrade with an autologous tissue procedure (which is where they make a boob out of a chunk of fat and/or muscle taken from elsewhere on your body).

But I figure I’ll just settle for the memories. It’s like being forty and longing for your twenties. You can look back and remember fondly, but you will never be twenty again, no matter what. That’s life.