Period is a time of consolidation. The various roles I played all crushing down and transformed into the shape of a woman. The ticking clock transports me back-and-forth, from the arena that I built for myself into a familiar little room with gray walls and gray lights. It happens in a kind of twilight under which, the harshness of life is moved to the front of the stage, and the weight is felt for my own mortality. I think it’s a pity that guys don’t get periods, they could benefit from its humbling side-effects.
I trust the outside world more while working hard ignoring my own chaotic thoughts. I seek comfort in the real world, relieved that there are still orders and props intact and there are real people living contently in it still. I’m grateful that the world that I sometimes happily stepped out of is still there when I need it. I can count on salmon bento-box for lunch and the local Japanese bookstore for hardcore Yaoi to satisfy my other craving. It’s easy to fantasize during period.
Yes, consolidations. As I was saying in the beginning, I feel like a little woman when I’m on period. My immediate concern has to do with not getting blood everywhere. It is a dream when I can be productive, but those times are closely followed by a feeling of exhaustion and defeat. Do you see yourself as one whole person all the time? I see myself as several. Nothing too crazy, just different parts of me having different strengths and yearnings. I find myself having to appease them by doing different things all the time like playing music, writing poem, meeting new people, doing new stuff. It can be going really well for 20 or so days in a month with all these characters going on their own tasks on their own slices of time, it’s the blood thing that unites them all. For a week or so, they all come home and be silenced, or they would tell their own stories around a bloody campfire. Then they would one by one set off again. (Sounds like a story from a Japanese horror manga now.)
It’s hard to admit to myself that I sometimes find myself dirty. I don’t want to admit it because that’s what some people think of women and they use that unexplained feeling of disquiet to discard women as an inferior animal. I don’t understand why I can’t just think myself out of these chores and hindrances. Why does anybody have to deal with anything? But maybe I’m just as scared as everybody else. There are things that control our lives which we prefer to forget. We don’t want to be reminded constantly of where we came from and where we are going. We look up to beauty because it hides the awful truth. But it’s OK for me now, I no longer judge things as they first appear, unless I’m on period, then my annoyance is justified because I’m high on life, the kind that will pay you back in kind.
I am a dirty woman, and I’m going to finish that juicy watermelon and re-read that delicious Yaoi that is full of half sentences.
hotsurf_ 