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.

Dear Pabst Blue Ribbon,

We’ve been together a long time, you and I. It’s been almost seven years since that first date but I remember it like it was lunch this afternoon—standing in a patch of sunlight in cut-offs and flip-flops, feeling so good, so right, and wondering why we’d never met before.

We’ve had some crazy times. Remember when we spent three hours in the ER last summer after falling off our bike on the way back from a birthday party? And how we gave the ambulance driver our ex’s name and address instead of our own and later called the nurse a cunt before stumbling out of the bright lights and into the heavy night air? And how we got lost on our way home in that vast and empty city they call a medical complex. We tried to hitch-hike back to town but no one would pick us up, maybe because it was three a.m. and there were leaves in our hair and our pants were ripped and we were wearing a neck brace. We cuddled on the sidewalk that night, sleeping soundly until a kindly bus driver picked us up drove us to our front door.

And remember a few months later when was climbed a tree and jumped over a barbed-wire fence and crossed a construction site the size of Ground Zero with a pretty girl to that most romantic of places: an eleven story crane? We climbed that crane, you and me and the pretty girl, ignoring the neurons firing in our brain, whispering, don’t do it, don’t do it, as cops circled the neighborhood below.

There have many nights as special as those, my friend: averted disaster, near arrest, decisions regretted. Was it a mistake to quit our job from the bathroom of a bar four hours before our shift started? No, no it was not. You’ve been always there for me, waiting patiently at five o’clock, in a way a job can never be. Chilled, that is, and in a can.

I stuck by you while everyone else cut carbs or switched to micro-brews or joined AA. I sat beside you on bar stools and listened, really listened, to you bitch about your inevitable dethroning. What would be the next beer of food-stamping hipsters around the country? Would it be Hamm’s, you worried, or maybe High Life? And when you ruined my chances with the graphic designer from Philly, the one who didn’t think it was a good idea to ride a shopping cart home, I didn’t mention that you haven’t won a blue ribbon since 1893. Friends don’t do that, no matter how annoyed we are that our last girlfriend left us because we make more money from bottle-deposits than from a paycheck.

The two of us have been through it all, can in hand.

We’ve only gotten closer with time. What started casually—on the weekends, maybe the occasional happy hour—has become a marriage of sorts. And, like all marriages, ours is not without its flaws. There was inauguration night, for instance, when you unintentionally tripped me on the way home from the bar. I know it wasn’t your fault—you were just fooling around, being silly—and I forgave you just as soon as I spit out my front tooth. So, yes, you’ve gotten me into a little trouble from time to time, but I know it’s not because you are devious, it’s because you love to have fun. There was Christmas morning, for example, when we woke up in our professor’s bed with her son knocking on the door to see what Santa brought. And there was that time we passed out in the neighbor’s yard and then told her that we were star-gazing and that she really didn’t need to call the cops but we would really appreciate bus fare. And years ago, there was that redheaded guy whose name we can’t remember but who taught us that men, even attractive men, can grow hair on their butts. That was a good lesson, wasn’t it? One that changed our life and sexual orientation forever.

The thing is, Pabst, we are growing apart. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. You no longer take up space in the fridge. And I can barely afford you anymore. It’s the recession. And my liver.

It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that I’m afraid of you.

There. I said it. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me when you pushed me into the bushes after the  Michael Jackson dance party and when you woke me up in the middle of the night and made me stick my finger down my own esophagus—but it’s not funny anymore.

And it’s not just me—my friends are concerned. They think we’re spending too much time together. They say they miss the old me. The me who answered text messages that weren’t regarding happy hour. The me who could be trusted with keys, who didn’t need to be walked home, who paid her phone bill, who didn’t hit on their exes, the me who who didn’t call them crying in the middle of the night. In short, they miss the me who didn’t embarrass them. Sure, they’ll also miss that special category of stories called “You Won’t Believe What I Did Last Night,” but they won’t miss hearing those stories over and over. I’m sorry, but they don’t want me to take you to brunch anymore.

I’ve changed as well. I’ve been spending more time in our favorite chair with Netflix and hot tea. I’m been thinking about possibly getting a job someday. I bought running shoes. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about you, because I have. But I need distance. We need a real break, not just like when we have a fever or when our parents visit.

I will never forget you, PBR. I will think of you every time I look at the boat tattoo on my left arm and the heart-shaped scar on my right shoulder. I will think of you every time I see the women we have loved and left. I will think of you at kickball in the Spring and at the pool in Summer and on Halloween night and Christmas morning and hot days and rainy days and snow days and every afternoon that the sun shines or that the sun doesn’t shine.

I’m not saying it’s forever. I might come crawling back in a month or a year or the next time it seems easier to be with you than to go running. But until then, please, stop calling and stop texting and stop dropping by just because you were in the neighborhood.

Yours always, but not right now.