#leaking out

If I stand far enough from the mirror in the washroom without my glasses on, my acne scars disappear and the sunlight hits my face and eyes until my skin has that ‘post-coital glow’ and my eyes are blinded to look at the wisps of hair escaping my bun and twirling around my head in cowlicks and fuzz and devil horns. For a second, I can pretend to be that woman in front of the flashing cameras on the red carpet with the sun burning all the reality away. 

I feel a tickle in my vagina like a bubble of air slowly moving down and outwards and I hold still, was I reading in a weird position again? But the bubble is too slow, too solid, too real to be air and I realize, eyes wide open in shock. I was not gassy and horny and merely frustrated all day today, all at the same time. It was cramps. I bolt towards the toilet and yank my pants and my underwear down. I pull my long kurta up and bunch it under my breasts and sit down. It was too late. My dark navy blue underwear had darker spots. Wet patches everywhere I touched, far older than the last hour. I heave out a sigh and with the realization, the pain kicks in. I don’t want to deal with this. 

Last month, the depression and the anger and the pain and the bloated-ness and the over sensitivity lasted an entire week before the blood came. And pain so bad I couldn’t breathe right for a few hours. But today, I thought I was just horny while sitting wrong. I gasp and squeeze my stomach as I hear a drop fall in the toilet water below, staining it red as I could imagine. ‘One good thing about cramps’ I grunt softly as the pain rolled like waves crashing down my abdomen, my fingers slippery from the sweat I wiped off my upper lip and nose as I typed down the message from my friend on my phone, ‘is that the cramps give you the best shits of the month’. She replies with “oof/yes/the best” and I smile while hugging my knees as sweat crawls on my breasts, nose, back, shoulders, and my face. I don’t know how I’m breathing but it’s so that my ribs don’t push my stomach down on my uterus. I stay there.

My mother is outside the door asking me for something. I rejoice, as much as I could in this state and yell, “My underwear is in my pants on the chair, can you hand it to me”. It takes time but it gets done. There is something weird about sitting on the toilet with your bum out and opening the door to see your mum, no matter how much she doesn’t want to see this, handing you the underwear and the bright pink cloth pouch your menstrual cup came in. It feels weird because, I tell myself, if I were living alone, I would have gotten up, gotten everything without making a mess, without embarrassment, without any fear of having to clean up the mess if I made one, without the tension. She shuts the door before I could and I tell myself one day I’m going to have no one pass me my underwear or the cup when I need it and that will be okay. 

I bunch up my probably stained pants and my underwear and throw them in the sink. I take the mug and fill it up. My pads are upstairs, I’ll have to get them later. I put on the new underwear and bunch it up around my ankles so it doesn’t touch the floor. Any higher and I wouldn’t be able to sit like a man. Once the cup is filled I bring the back and the front ends of my kurta together in front of me and twist them into a braid which I then fold and tuck in my bra, there’s only so many hands I have, knowing it’ll wrinkle the cloth. And I get to work.

I take a big breath and hold it, and hold my knees open. With the mug of water in my right hand I wash my vagina with the left. On the first day there is always more slime, more mucous. Sometimes not even red. I wash my hair first, pinching the tips and washing off the blood in my hand with the water. Once the hair is clean I touch the outside of my vagina and it feels how I imagine seals would. Smoother than shaved legs. This one is so slippery, very difficult to wash, takes too much water. I resort to scratching lightly and it works, and feels good. My nails gently scrape the blood off of my upper thighs, under the hair. I always waste too much water on this step because scratching feels good. My lungs burn now so I move my mouth to my shoulder and breathe out. And before the smell comes back up I take in another big breath but I know this one can’t last long. The sweat drips down my eyebrow and I blink to avoid getting it into my eye, the sun etches reality back onto me. 

And then, with a third of the water left in the cup I put my index finger in and touch the walls, the right side first, going all the way to the back and then curling my finger and out. There’s a lot of blood, I wash it off with the water. I know I shouldn’t do this too much but I can’t help it again. Feels satisfactory to speed up the process. I am done when the water is. I lean forward, which always hurts because of how I am sitting and with my clean right hand, turn the tap on and let it fill. I take the cup out of the pouch with that single hand and give it over to my left. It is thick dry pink silicone. Like a squished ice cream cone with a ribbed tail stained red. I turn the tap off and lift the heavy mug back towards me, trying not to spill any. I wet the cup, softly squeezing it in my hand but it doesn’t really turn softer. I sigh and remember a few seconds (too) later that I don’t mind the smell now. 

I do my best so as to not drop the cup. With a finger I spread myself as much as I could. The rest are holding the bent cup as tightly as they can. Before it slips and pops back into its original position I put it where I hope the hole is and I push. It always hurts a bit, probably because I washed all the slime off but I wiggle it a bit and a few deep breathes so I get loose and about a fourth of it pops in. I usually think about my virginity during this moment and how unimpressive it really is to have things inside me as opposed to what porn and men made me think it would be like. The next five minutes is me pushing two fingers and the bent cup into me with as much pain as I can compromise for speed until ts more than half way in. Holding the cup secure with my four fingers I send the index in again, probing the corners where it folded in on itself and push it further in. Sometimes it never goes as deep as it can to avoid the the outer ribs of the cups chafing my walls but some days I am too tired to deal with it unless it hurts too much and I go back on the toilet and probe around to realize that somehow it’s in sideways. 

Once that’s done I wash the rest of me until the water’s finished again. I put the mug down and get up until I’m doing half a squat on the seat and shake a little to get rid of all the water. I pull my underwear up by my thumbs. It’s always too tight during periods. I flush and go wash wash my hands. Let the clothes soak for a bit before I wash the blood off them. I clean up the mess and go upstairs and get my loud bright huge packets of pads and shove them in the cupboard. I take one one out and go back inside the bathroom. 

I drop my clothes again and sit down, opening the pad, the wrapper crinkling, sticking to my fingers with the static. I stick it onto the sink. I like to save them so I have something to wrap the pads in before I throw them, the packets rolled neatly like tiny cigarettes. I open up the pad and grab my underwear to realize its wet. My hair soaked it through. Still I try to stick the pad on it, press it down, hold the sticky bits for a few seconds but it pops right back up. No different that sweaty underwear, the pad refuses to stay until I have tired for ten minutes and the wings are all bent and folded and stuck to each other. I consider how tired and hot I am. I could just sit on it until it stick but I know that won’t work. A little shift and I might as well be bleeding down my clothes again. Better yet have my hair stick to the pad when its dry and have it yanked out when I move. 

I fist my hands tight and clasp them together and stare real hard at the wall. There is a wiper to my left and I’m itching to throw it. Wreck the whole damn room. If there was a table in front of me I would have broken it. I hold it in, sitting like a man staring real hard at all the damn wetness. I am surprised by my own anger, I had forgotten I had it. And just as quick as it came, it’s gone. With nothing to show that it was ever there except for my clasped hands and all the sweat that I am going to be under for the next few days. No. I decide. The anger was real. And it means something. It means I will do what I want to do to give myself some comfort. I leave the pad and pull up my underwear, my pants still off, and march out and grab myself another pad and a new, dry underwear. It’s a less than ten second thing but my mom still stares at me. Quite hard. I storm back in.

I take off my underwear and put it next to where the first one was soaking. I put on the dry one, it’s a bit more expensive but thinner and less tight, stretched loose with all the pads. I sit down again and pull my knees open until its as stretched as it would be around my hips and I open the new pad and put it down and make it stick. I don’t like pads, that’s why the cup, even if sometimes it doesn’t really fit. Pads itch, they fold wrong. Sometimes I leak out around them and stain anyway. After a week they give me a rash. They do that weird sticking out thing at the butt and when you sit on them wrong they stick together and then its ruined. But I might leak around the cup, I might stain my underwear if I don’t wear them. 

So I frown the guilt down of wasting a pad, thinking of all the girls, the poor ones, the dark skinned ones, the ones that leap out from ads (thery’re always poor and dark skinned and the Indian ones have ribbons in their pigtails) and stories your friends tell of their roommates who wasted pads cause of spotting. I fold the pad as neatly as i would a used one and I wrap it up in the wrapper. I pull everything up and wince. Not at the cramps, or at the heat, at my head getting dizzy from dehydration or standing up, at my period-induced diarrhea that I know I’ll be getting in a few hours. The pad feels weird. I’m always frowning as I reach down and try to twist it to adjust the space between my legs but it takes the opposite shape bound to get stained at the sides and somehow the outside of my underwear rather than the actual pad first. I always frown cause now it’s time to walk out and deal with it again and have to hide it again even though mom can see. 

I walk out having forgotten all about the sun and how much hair I have and how my skin is because the pain is getting worse and the girl in the mirror is very much me and the cameras are very much still there in my mind and in the minds of those who think that pads should looks prettier getting marketed than felt being used and in the minds of those for whom I have to bury that innocently white clean pad in the trash deep down so that the loud ugly bright green wrapped does not peek out and the sun has etched this hidden blood on my face with the grimace and I think of the cameras and the shadows of my face and the shape of my eyes and the feeling of my hands clenched together. 

I think of what I will say to the man who asks me to smile. I will tell him that I am familiar with blood and that I can acquaint him with his own too. I will tell him that my period cravings will make me bite through his throat and gulp down all the blood I have lost until his spine is my teeth to wag as I reclaim the name he so fondly calls me: bitch. The truth is this anger feels good, the one that is spent on things not quite real, by bravery not quite our own. And it feels good to have my teeth and have my blood that I will not hide from the sun and from the cameras as I rewrite my introduction to my own body. This anger feels as pretty as I did before the blood came. But the blood came, and I’m still here and I’m still me.