Sometimes as the night winds down and we’ve almost caught up on Top Chef1 and the contact lenses that I wear most days owing to a vestige of the teenage vanity which got me out of glasses in the first place though with them my vision is never quite right and anyway at ten pm they are dried out across my eye, a crackable new skin of dehydrated goop between me and all that I can (kind of) see, and the sweet limbo hours just us alone in the apartment where there is no working or mending or finding or troubling and probably nothing happening outside I tell myself dumbly and the sweet limbo hours are both winding down and just beginning and bed calls and tomorrow is coming but not yet and I’m chugging ice water with a straw and I used to not think I liked these metal boba straws that Megan bought but as happens over and over again like so many miracles I never would have tried to pray for she knew better what I wanted and drinking then I bite the straw gently just to hear the tiny plink of my teeth there and feeling just one or three hairs too high, happy, helium-sick squeaking sound in my own head when I laugh at popcorn kernel thoughts exploding and that’s when I remember nobody anywhere ever has known what pain feels like for anybody else alive or dead.
Watching women’s college basketball I recall days menstrual cramps have made me sweat, stifle tears so long then sob, vomit, pass out, stay in bed all weekend counting minutes til more meds and wanting to die and basically you sound like a pervert or an misogynist if you see women blocking out and shooting threes and you want to talk about periods but I do sometimes just wonder how they do it and if I am just not strong.
Birth control made me nauseous every day for months in college and I never thought to tell the doctor or try something else because the queasy hours every morning and arriving as a ghost at Introduction to Semiotics or American Theater with lavender lips was, I really thought, just the price I had to pay to be a slut and everything else about me then was carefully, artificially oriented around the irreverent tragedy of being a girl touched and touched and not loved, touched, and I see now there was a lot I made up and then took as incontrovertible fact but you can’t take it back, I guess, the way you were, and the drugs didn’t work anyway. My cramps screamed on a week a month and all the bed linens still soaked through and you really aren’t allowed to miss a pill I learned.
Waking back to life on a purple bathmat overlong unwashed and finding pinky swirls on the stick-on tile. Shower water mostly and the rest from inside me. When I’ve turned an ankle or cut my finger slicing tomato I think, really, this isn’t so bad. There are a lot of pains I haven’t tried. It could be that I’m fragile. I’m taking the pill again even though I steer clear now of sex that can make babies2 and have a fear of my tits getting bigger at all and on the second week I felt the gentlest little tickles of pain between my hip bones and thought if this knuckle cracking ache is all that others are feeling then why haven’t they cured cancer why don’t they build us each a castle where we can’t be killed we should have flying cars if I’m the only one really hurting but of course that’s not the case. I have “bad periods” as one might say and even when I’ve really thought dying would be better than committing not only to getting through this feeling but to having it again even then I guess the pain was a six or seven, right? How bad can it be just to bleed? There are a lot of pains I haven’t tried. If there were a machine somewhere that one of these bloodless white skirted clean little operators dreamed to being perhaps, well, if there was a real machine like the Uncle Fester Addams Family arcade game of the 1990s where you’d hold onto metal handles and the whole thing shakes shakes shakes and chatters your teeth and vibrates the middle bits of you pleasingly in a funny approximation of electrocution okay what I mean is if there was something like that where I could grab on and feel for just a moment what pain is to other people I’d grab on. I would want to know.
I do love women’s basketball3 and I’m sorry for bringing up blood. I do wonder a lot about other women because I would not want to be a man at all it gives me a shiver even though sometimes I want to be quite like a boy which is different and mainly about haircuts and ill-kempt feelings. I wonder a lot about other women because I would not want to be a man all right I don’t go in much for two genders distinct and pink hair bows or blue plastic boxing gloves I know anyone can have a uterus and obviously it’s not about your haircut and dropping fistfuls and measuring cups of penny-scented uterine lining is not the sum of “womanhood” and also what is womanhood I’m only myself and it’s hard to talk about periods without feeling like a health teacher or, much worse, some bitch online posting about the divine woman animal and her power pussy whatever just to fuck with trans people which is stupid because it doesn’t matter where you piss I’m talking about pain and sometimes I cry and can’t eat when the blood is coming I feel and so bone-deep sad in a way like it won’t ever end and maybe I’m wondering mostly how everyone gets everything done with a body like a knife curling in and if I am uniquely lacking in vigor and nerve or is everyone just smarter than me and has got an IUD.
My hair is drying nicely and I took my pill. There was no work today since Jesus died. Next month we go to Europe and I want to leave no rust splotches anywhere and see Versailles without a fist behind my belly button but if the hormones haven’t dried me out and laid me smooth I will eat street crepes still and make out. I bought white sneakers as a gesture of hope and good faith for the future and the spring. I’ve never broken my a bone but a finger or been cut deep enough for stitches and I have taken only one real true punch. Jesus had a whole thing go on with his body they say in the movie musical at least and I guess that must have been a ten but I can’t know. My stubbed toes are the only ones I’ll ever feel which scares me for some reason having to do, I think, with the big ever re-emptying hole inside that wants to know about things just to check it off the list okay I got that one yeah let me read a bit I googled so I’ve learned and you can’t learn aching, really, only bite it when it comes, then wait. So I do wonder.
consider: Joni Mitchell “Little Green” as ever, for always. ** Literally Deal or No Deal Island. Don’t ask me a bunch of questions or anything. It’s on Peacock. It is hosted by that handsome guy Joe whose last name I can’t spell. The werewolf from True Blood. I met him at work. He seems nice but he is entirely beside the point I just thought someone may want to know. This is a very stupid show to watch only if you are wondering how Boston Rob is doing in 2024. The answer is great but don’t let knowing that already stop you from seeing for yourself.** Tonight we are going to see the probably bad Godzilla X Kong movie but I’m happy because I want a bucket of soda and to hold my girl’s hand a little and I think it’s funny to say I’m supporting the film career Dan Stevens asked to be killed off Downton Abbey for and I actually do hope he is happy with his choice really why not we will all be dead someday and in the end it’s very sexy for cousins in love to be torn asunder but I don’t know, like, I am still going to laugh.
Feeling very optimistic about the new season! You never have to hand it to the greater NBCUniversal industrial complex but Bravo was so right in recognizing that just about the only way to soothe the sting of losing Padma Lakshmi’s austere, vaguely disgusted presence was to bring in a hot, cheerful lesbian in her place.
Not to boil down love and romance and fucking or human people at all to anything so dull as types and shapes of fleshy parts but just, I mean, from a practical standpoint the contraception component is gratefully beyond my sphere of concern now and forever.
If you have access to ESPN, tomorrow the 30th is going to be a very excellent day of Sweet Sixteen hoops. Just fucking fyi. There’s rain coming here so I know where I’ll be parked and bobbing around dropping into anxious little pushups and saying some nothings about chasing your own rebounds or double dribbles.