Farfara

The power of Fred is extraordinary. I don't know how women handle it. Well, I do, of course, know how we handle it, but it always surprises me how cunning and stealthy that the powers of menstruation can be. They can rise you up and thwap you on the side of the head and make you believe that it was your own hand that did the striking.

PMS can be scary if it makes you think you're going crazy. I just wish I'd remember that I'm a bleeder and not this kind of androgynous angel who finds myself in one plane of existence as much as in another. I'm a Red Sister with a head that tells me I am dying and best get on with it, with the melting neopolitan sky dripping on my head. My PMS seems to be not of the kind that energizes my actions, though, that's not what I mean. It doesn't want me to use myself to make positive change, it wants to use me as a vessel for fear. To venture into lands of restraint and sorrow and send this fleshy gondola down the watery ways of regret, the blue tinged rue that cascades and spreads through the arteries. My PMS wants me to be sad about dying, sad about living, sad that the bird's not getting back to her nest and the baby birds are dying and isn't that just fucking like everything nowadays?

But a little blood, or excuse me, a little sloughing of the endometrial fluid, and I feel stronger. I feel stronger with that shit leaking out of me. Like I had been trapped in a room with a new air freshener and no circulating air, and there was just those hormones, those smelly hormones, telling my head secrets, confabulations, dressing me up and down, ever cutting down like a tailor working on his last suit, ever another place to tuck a dart.

This is how men and women are different. On this very biological level. This monthly weakening and strengthening, this binding by the hair to the moon and feet to the tides and being asked to use our bodies to play the earth as a violin, saw it in twain, nevermind it all, the womb is a diamond. So rare, so precious, so hard it can cut through mountains.

In case you haven't been telling it, I've been having a hard time of it and not fucking understanding why. It doesn't mean the problems aren't there, you know, but it doesn't mean that we're at the apocalyptic freak-out level.

Gotta get away from the William Gibson and stay with my Charlotte Bronte and do what I can to keep my diamonds and marbles kept in their respective pockets.