TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

When I was twenty years old and more in love than I have ever been in love and maybe even more in love than is possible for someone of my cardiac size to love more than once in life, my period turned into an acidic monster. I’d never been much of a light days kind of menstruator, but something happened that year to give me the bowel-twisting cramps that make a hysterectomy numbed by bag of frozen peas seem like a better option than dealing with that shit for another week. What happened? My size twelve pain may have had something to do with a change in lifestyle—I went from being a real serious athlete to being a real serious porch-sitter—but I suspect it had less to do with the sedentary lifestyle of the marijuana abuser and more to do with embracing my gayness.

Any woman who has lived, worked, or changed a light bulb with another woman knows what I’m talking about—it’s something to do with the moon and wolves and tides or something—but when you spend a bunch of hand ticks with other ladies, your blood drip gets all wonky. In my case, six years ago I spent every waking and non-waking moment with my inaugural girlfriend. I was unbearably, unsustainably butterflied to be alive and to be gay because I woke up every morning with a woman who looked like a half-Cuban Princess Di without the crazy eyes. Every morning I looked down on this woman—my girlfriend!—sleeping on her side and on my arm, which I couldn’t feel but didn’t mind because a numb arm was nothing when the rest of me was so golden, and reached over her with my living arm to get a joint off my beside table, which I then lit and smoked with one hand, which later proved to be good practice for texting while driving. I was happy.

However, it only took a few weeks of bumping fussies for my XX chromosomes to get seriously out of good. My cramps had always been a bitch, but a dozen Alleve and a few bong hits for breakfast usually muted the screams long enough to shower and get dressed. But now my emotional state right before the blood clots flowed perched somewhere betwixt outpatient and padded walls. This was a problem. I depleted my monthly allocation of tears in three days, yet was completely unable to recognize why I wanted to take an forever nap in a refrigerator box. This lasted for the duration of our relationship.

The strangest part of the girlfriend/girlfriend menstrual cycle when I was with A— was that we never bled together. There is something wrong with this. I’ve cycled with housemates, friends, co-workers, bartenders. My roommate and I talk about alpha-ing each other every month. She blames me when her blood ocean is off calendar, I blame her when mine is. It’s a constant struggle for period dominance. With A— and I, the struggle was never resolved. Four years and no cohesion. Two women PMSing at once is bad, girlfriends PMSing for literally half their relationship is really bad. As soon as I would calm down and get my head out of the oven, A— would push me out of the way and stick hers in.

Also around the time we got together, I became a night bleeder. I had never been a blood squirter before. In the seven years previous to meeting A—, I had bled through the sheets maybe once or twice and I haven’t at all since we gave up. But all of a sudden we were waking in the the morning in a sticky red sea, like Jack Woltz after his horse head slumber party. She was always patient, my girlfriend, always helped me wash the sheets and flip the mattress, and, like the mother of a six-year-old who may get exasperated that her kid keeps wetting the bed, she knew I wanted this to happen even less than she did and loved me despite the washing bill and the ruined sheets.

The period thing was, at times, touching. When a girl is in bed, cursing her ovaries and praying to wake up to a change in anatomy, you bring her tea and a hot water bottle and massage her lower back and when her mood swings from crying to screaming to punching, you tell her you love her.

A— went to shower one morning while I was still in bed. I got up before she was clean and dry and walked naked and blind from our bedroom to the kitchen to make coffee. I am bat-like without my cornea shirkers so I didn’t notice the red drips on our kitchen floor until A— got out of the shower and saw I had tracked my own blood across the kitchen and back again. We laughed and mopped the floor and forgot about it, unworried and uncaring because their was nothing terrible about my her blood or mine.

When A— and I broke up a few years later, she sent a box of leftovers to my new home across the country. Artifacts of when times were good—postcards, notes we left on each others’ pillows, letters we wrote when distance kept us apart. Among the refuse was something I hadn’t seen before—a poem she had written. I remember a line from the poem, just a fragment. Drops of blood from coffee pot to shower. It’s still in the box she sent. I could pull it out, read the rest, thumb through the past, happy that I knew electricity, sad that I may not again, but I’ll keep it there, at the bottom of its cardboard cage, full of blood and love and the memory of what was.