Period Piece Pt 1.

The anxiety creeps up your spine when you realize you have to change your tampon. Carefully you fumble a new one out of the inner pocket of your bag into your clenched fist. You hope your conversation partner will notice none of this. You scoot from behind the tables and walk through the café to the public bathroom. The family at the next table stares at you. Do they see through your white knuckles and notice the hidden shape? Or is there blood on your skirt… 

The first time you see blood in your underwear, you think you’re dying. Then you remember your friends sharing the blossoming of their adulthood, so you search all the cabinets in the bathroom, until you find a pad. 

You start a learning curve over the next few periods and figure out, when and how much you bleed, how many days your cycle is. How many small diapers and internal sponges you need to have to cover this and when to change them. This period is filled with uncomfortable bathroom visits, in which you find your underwear to be the set of a slasher movie. Changing the pad is not going to clean your underwear. 

Throughout your awkward teenage years, your period becomes regular, the changing of pads and products goes flawlessly and you become accustomed to the monthly routine. You joke about it with friends and discuss the pill to control your flow and pain-level with your doctor.

And then it happens again. The blood has spilled and you feel like that awkward teenager again, doing a handstand in the hallway, the skirt fell down and your friends stared with a mixture of disgust and pity at your crotch. “Maybe you shouldn’t do handstands today...” one of them whispered. I got the hint. The rest of the day I shuffled through the hallway, my thighs pressed together.

In an alternative scenario, your first period will transform you. It will be seen as a sign of ripeness. As if you are a low-hanging peach, of sexual and mental maturity. Making you suddenly desirable, yet paradoxically repulsive. Your maturity comes paired with impurity and shame. Your child-like innocence is now seen as alluring. Your movements get a promiscuous connotation as you are now a seductress. Your blood is the scarlet letter embroidered on your cloak. 

You may be excluded from religious rituals, the preparation of food or family life altogether, until your flow has passed. 

Your period may have cultural side-effects such as a predetermined central role in the household and childcare and additional layers of clothing. It can cause the determination of your formal education and the beginning of a family. Your period may be the end of your childhood and the forceful jumpstart of womanhood. 

*****

In a perfect world, a period is normalized and celebrated. It signals that you are going to be an adult, which will give you so many choices. It is exciting, choosing who you want to be. Girls get educated about their biology and learn how to use different hygiene products. Boys also get taught about female biology. They go to the supermarket to get the right tampons and some chocolate for their first girlfriend, who has confided that she had an accident or an emotional day. Pads and tampons are as cheap and widely available as toilet paper. In every bathroom is a little box with free tampons and pads in case you forgot yours. The pill and more ecofriendly hygiene products are covered by health-insurance. 

When you have cramps so bad that you cannot move, you shamelessly call in sick. Because it is not an excuse. 

This is a perfect world. To make that the world our grandchildren live in, we have to start working towards it now. We have to start breaking the taboo now. Period.

 

Rupi Kaur writes:

Apparently it is ungraceful of me

To mention my period in public

Because the actual biology

Of my body is too real

It is okay to sell what’s

Between a woman’s legs

More than it is okay to

Mention its inner workings

The recreational use of

This body is seen as

Beautiful while

Its nature is seen as ugly

Milk and Honey (2015) Andrews McMeel, Kansas City. “The Healing”, 177. www.rupikaur.com

  Photos by Maud Fernhout

Star-Sprinkled Body

I close the fridge, shoving the huge pile of leftover pasta into the microwave and sit down with a glass of water. When you have to constantly put food on other peoples’ table to make money, you forget to eat yourself. My legs hurt from 9 hours of walking, standing and occasionally sprinting and the hour of cycling, my feet throb. The microwave beeps and five minutes later the dishwasher turns on. Upstairs, I undress to get in the shower, my reflection in the toothpaste spotted bathroom mirror follows my lead. I look at my outershell and light a cigarette.

Right now, I am five different shades of white: bleached paperwhite, white shirt after a few washes, eggshell, breadstick and well-done home made vanilla crumble cookie. The tan lines separating white from white tell the different phases of my summer behavior, how often I wear a shirt, bra, pants or slippers.

My cheeks are as cold as the bums on the marble statues in the Vatican. What classical beauty a rainy night can bring out.

My legs are long

and white like rice noodles before you boil them for 8 minutes and rinse them with cold water. My legs are hairy. It started as an experiment a few months ago, as a protest against the male gaze, I challenged myself to let my hair live up to its fullest potential. I’ve gotten attached to my furry jungle, so I kept it.

My skin never listens to me. It’s more sensitive to stress than I am. My face and body react in different ways but generally, there are 3 scenarios:

11)    I’m stressed and my face pimples and my body psoriases, which stresses me out and contributing to the worsening of the skin situation the outbreak.

22)    I’m stressed and get worried that I’ll be breaking out and those extra worries make me break out.

33)    I’m chill, but I break out, making me realize how stressed I actually am, about anything, our purpose, our meaning, how I decide to live my life, whether I’ll be homeless and unemployed in a month and whether people actually like me.

I’m covered in birthmarks. Spotted like the milky way. If you trace the ones on my left forearm, you’ll be able to reveal sign from the heavens: a retarded seal. Sorry. Mentally challenged. Since light therapy, I’ve gotten more, so maybe the seal has been consealed, lost in the white noise of the newcomers. Some of the new ones are evil and need to be cut out. How many scars make a pirate? And where should I send my resume to apply?

            If you follow the downwards arrow-shaped shadows of my ribs, you will arrive at my tummy. It has a little silver pendant in it. Papa Francesco will be looking straight at you. However, my belly used to be of a much more blasphemous faith. Barbarically observed, measured, pinched and squeezed. It could not be inverted enough. Hipbones had to stick out 1,5 cm over whatever bodypart is in between them. If not, the ritual would begin, and fasting would be my only pillar of worship. Luckily, these days I get more satisfaction out of fries and the pope.

I’ve always liked my hands. They are skeletal, see-through tools with conveniently chewed and chipped fingertips. The nails are always just that length where I burn the new skin, that is forming under the nail I so violently ripped off, when I do the dishes. On my right hand, there is an inexplicable black spot, which I always tell people is my first tattoo. I supposedly got it when someone stabbed me with a pen in primary school. In actuality, my mom told me a suspiciously similar story when I was a kid. So I must have adapted and implanted the story into my memory. Interesting how our mind tricks us, because the story of my battle scar is as defining as any other memory to me.

My face has been through a lot of transformation, which usually revolved around either minimizing or maximizing my facial expression. Either extravagantly applied full face or just eyebrows (blond people miss out on all that fun). My forehead is wrinkly, because my mom always had wrinkles, which made her like a wise turtle or owl to me. She would prefer owl. I felt like she’d fold her face and in its folds a solution to any problem would slowly develop, as in the end, after frowning, things usually got solved somehow.

I sat in front of the mirror for hours to train my forehead muscles, flexing all day. Before I knew it, I also had wisdom folds, but unfortunately, the wisdom did not come along with them. My problem-solving skills even went slightly backwards, other kids called me gorilla, as my face had become very flexible and extremely expressive.

My hair is red and dready. A while back, I decided that shampoo was a capitalist lie. The first few days, it was very difficult to live with the truth, as my hair looked like it had been used to clean out a deep frying pan. Then I just got used to it, and my volume was off the charts. Unfortunately, I became rather quite self-conscious when noticing the difference between its fabulous appearance in my eyes and its allegedly “moppy” appearance to others. Luckily, shampoo turns out to be an easier capitalist lie to accept than the systemic oppression of the working class.

I stand in front of the mirror and smile. Ears like pin cushions, obnoxious hair, chewed fingernails, irregularly tanned and slightly blemished. Stripped down to the cigarette.  

Portraits by Maud Fernhout

Writer's Block

I haven’t written in a week. My mind has stayed as blank as the page in front of me. I pick up my pen and begin to doodle in the corner, breaking in the page for when I might find actual words. Unlike actual birth (I think, I have to admit that I’m not an expert), creative birth cannot be forced in any way, it will just happen. You might just be waiting tables or cycling or tuning out of a conversation with friends when the contractions come in waves. If you’re too late to capture the idea, you will miss the birth and lose the child.

But here I am, racing on my scrap horse through Amsterdam, and in front of me, my writer’s block speeds off. I can barely make out the postcardability of the houses alongside the canals, as I peddle and pant. My only true goal is to overtake my writer’s block and beat the shit out of it. I will use its skin as a parchment to scribble a new inspiring tale on. Writer’s block ignores a red light but as I follow, cars are closing in from both sides.

But here I am, at one side of the table, with my writer’s block across from me. We might be playing poker, but I would have to google some technical terms and strategies to make the context and descriptions seem more natural, realistic. What if I do that research and an expert reads it and it turns out I was wrong about everything. Maybe if I want to describe my struggle with my writer’s block, I should choose something more up my alley?

              

               What I could write about?

1. Feminism Already wrote on several feminist topics, it’s how I profile myself. So something about a buff self-sufficient gay boy, or wait, maybe free the nipple is better. Maybe combine it with science fiction? Free your 8 nipples? Maybe a coming out story, is it memoire time? No, that is too personal to share, but then again does that not make it precisely something I should share? 
2.  . . . . . 
3.  . . . . .

3.   

I should do a literary analysis of smoking described throughout literature. Yes, instead of fiction, I’d show a more thoroughly  intellectual side of me. I’d describe what states of mind authors hide behind smoking behavior, such as anxiety, panic, carelessness or rebelliousness, and look at which words in the extensive smoking vocabulary have specific emotional connotations. When do people breathe clouds, puff away, fume, steam, fidget with their ciggie, roach, cancerstick, stub, jab, crush or toss it out? What does it say about a character if (s)he huffs a cigarette, a cigar or a joint? 

But what if analysis turns out to be boring to read? The reader might expect me to lead them to other planes of reality and existence, exposing ties and references made by other minds before me. Actually, since we live in a postmodern era, everything I analyze, write or think, has already been analyzed, written and thought before.

                              I can’t be original.

So let’s do what I did already: pick a cliché sequence of tropes and rewrite them, aware of that the writer’s profession at this point in time is reassembly rather than production. I’m a collage artist. Being an artist implies that one can turn pulp into art, but what if I turn fiction into pulp? My frame of reference is limited, everyone has their limits. As I’m just one person at a time,  how can I convey true meaning if I only follow the threads forming my own web of references, possibly unable to understand the meaning I create for others in my own writing? In other words, I can only see the world through my eyes unless someone entrusts me to see their perspective on my - or depending on how you view reality - our world. So how can I use other people’s thoughts while only perceiving a segment of their meaning, to convey my own truths to others?

Nothing comes to mind.

Maybe it’s time to seek inspiration from the quotes I collect that strike me as powerful or literarily playful; they might be a good start for at least exploring what my options for this collage are. People on social media appear to find their sense of purpose and inspiration through quotes, implying there must be some collectively understood knowledge that can be transferred in them.

My collection of quotes in my current notebook consists of:

a.      One has to remark that men ought to be well-treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves from lighter injuries, of more serious they cannot, therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.   (Machiavelli, The Prince, III)

b.      Frank had the body of a bull, an image he intensified by wearing great gold hoops through his nipples. Unfortunately he had joined the hoops with a chain of heavy gold links. The effect should have been deeply butch but in fact looked rather like the handle of a Chanel shopping bag.              (Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body)

c.      And now comes the spiritual climax of this book, for it is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far. This is why I had gone to Midland City: to be born again. And Chaos announced it was about to give birth to a new me by putting these words in the mouth of Rabo Karabekian: “what kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?”              (Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 218)

Somehow it feels like these would not form a  collage that conveys one truth to the reader. What if people don’t even want to read my stories anymore? What if people do not even care for the art of the narrative anymore? The power of the narrative has recently been muddling the reader’s quest for truth. I can’t imagine how many people stopped reading fiction when we started living in a world where we already spend all day trying to distinguish truth from fable, equally presented to us as facts. 

When I see my lists, quotes and ideas codified in my own handwriting, I feel empty. I put my pen down. The cycle of temporary defeat and creative birth continues and I will have to wait, as a blank slate, to be inspired.

 I work, go to museums with my sophisticated friends, occasionally drink too much at a bar, sturdy Arabic. Enchanting photography, flat tires, afrofunk, late nights, buttshaking, cycling through the rain and forgetting to finish the food in the corner of the fridge on time. While I’m taking out the rancid trash, all synapses in my brain are firing, buzzing and zinging. It’s happening.