Revised

You almost always feel it before you see it. Sometimes it comes as a stringlike, pulling pain, snaking down your abdomen. Sometimes the soiled underwear dampens your inner thighs. On lucky days, you feel a rolling weight slide down a skin inside your skin.

You hesitate to call it blood because it carries unnamed tissues and formless things. Those gooey, semitransparent blobs of not-flesh and not-liquid, tangled with dark, cherry-colored spots. The dark spots stretch into a galaxy against the backdrop of vermillion smudge.

It cannot be blood because blood flows. You’ve seen blood climb up a needle, dripping out of a cut; but you’ve only seen this thing stuck on a tampon or a pad. On the heavy days, when your legs shudder from the icy toilet porcelain, your palm is warmed by moisture emanating from a weighty load. The entire cotton stick is soaked into a body-temperature, crimson popsicle. It fills the bathroom stall with a salty, rusting air. You wonder whether it is in the atmosphere now, and whether you carry that atmosphere around you. On other days it is more two dimensional. You discover a dry, long, maroon mark stretched against the white sanitary napkin. Blood crumbs adhere to the microscopic synthetic fibers.

Some days it doesn’t cross your mind. You sit through classes, oblivious to the red trail it leaves on the chair. Then when you are walking to lunch someone taps lightly on the shoulder. You turn around to eyes widened in politeness. They lightly whisper: “Hey, there’s something on your, umm, jeans.”

Rewritten

There are many kinds of periods.

There is the kind that fills up an entire extra-long, extra fluffy, extra expensive sanitary napkin and still spills over into the air.

There is the kind that comes in slow drips, bright red or maroon.

The worst kind is the ones that you don’t see. It drags down your insides, twists your abdomen like a laundry machine, but never shows itself. What is it afraid of? Why does it hide to torture you in the darkness of your body? A worthy enemy shows its face. The mask of no shape cannot be penetrated. 

When you were younger you had tried to understand it. As if staring at the gooey, jelly like things you could decipher what part of the body it is, whether it is a waste or a wound.

When you couldn’t figure it out, the tissues and blood stare back at you with a disgusting blank face. You toss it into the trash.

But now you’re old. Now you spend more time with its more invisible kind. You feel the back pain deeper inside your spine, and so you learn to pop ibuprofen with hot water. You learn to stretch and maybe jog and put it on the calendar. You are productive. You stop asking why or how or what. You just put it on your calendar. Another thing. Another event.

It’s been so long since you looked or thought about it. But when they say the word “feminism” you feel a sharp pain cut through your abdomen.

Notes:

During revision, it was challenging to hold back the urge to add in infinitely more details, metaphors, more ways to say the same thing. I had to go over the text a third time, after walking away a bit, to make sure the text still makes sense as a contained piece of writing. In other words, editing blended into writing; and it is difficult to read what one is writing.

Rewriting was completely different. I was a bit dreary of the object so I chose to write with a stronger voice of my own, and was less concerned about conveying its objective qualities. Rather, it is rewritten from an experiential perspective.