The two best parts about getting your period revolve around the guaranteed respite from men.
The first is obvious: you are not carrying a child and thus, run no risk of potentially being forced to tolerate the man you’ve had a couple weeks of fun with for approximately the next 18 years (but maybe less if he dies unexpectedly or decides to give being a deadbeat a fair shot).
Sure, you’ve turned a blind eye to his apparent inability to wash dishes because so far, you only wandered through his kitchen naked at 1am to grab two more beers from the fridge (one for you now and one for you later), but what if refusing to believe that you must scrape the leftover food from the pan before you soak it, or even in soaking pans at all, is a hereditary trait? Your infallible, self-aborting, shedding uterus just saved you from a future of screaming basic domestic knowledge at a foul heathen and his minion clone!
The second is that all you have to do is bitch, whine, moan, and/or complain about your period, and the man (or men!) in your life will avoid you like your vessel is currently a rented-out banquet room for a highly-infectious disease!
There is no doubt that most men are morons regarding the rigor of a menstrual cycle, some with enough gall to broadcast their ignorance like your distant white cousins sharing essay-length Facebook posts about how their past experiences of being stopped by police have been nothing short of POLITE and NON-CONFRONTATIONAL because respect is GIVEN where it is EARNED, but many of those have gone quiet after more than a few members of their voting party/race have lost their jobs over their illiteracy when it comes to reading a room. I can’t recall any victorious stories of men getting fired over Tweeting “When are females going to learn that your period isn’t an excuse to be a fucking psycho bitch???” but I find solace in assuming that the severity of whatever backlash they did receive, possibly from their girlfriend or sister or millions of girlfriends, sisters, mothers, aunts, cousins, etc. was far, far worse.
One of the only compliments I can pay to my past partners (who floundered enough in other areas that the probable consensus of my readers is that my intelligence level could not have been higher than theirs for me to agree to regularly have sex with them in the first place) is that though they may have thought something like that, they sure as shit didn’t say it to me!
Blissfully unaware that the worst day of the month has arrived and they died in their sleep and woke up in Hell, they yawn, fart, scratch their balls, smell their fingers, sniff their armpits to compare the stink, pick their nose, fart again, grab their phone, and text me, “Good morning, beautiful! I hope your day shines as bright as you do!”
(“Gm, wyd today” is more like it, but I did date a guy who was kind enough to send me paragraph-long adaptations of that. I abbreviated it so your most recent meal will stay in your stomach, and people immediately think you’re lying when you doctor up a story with a lot of detail, but someone really did like me once! I’m not lying!)
Reading it, I scowl at their disgustingly saccharine waste of goddamn kilobytes and consider ignoring them for the next five days as punishment for being kind to me until I remember that they didn’t really do anything wrong.
“Good news, you’re not going to be a father. Bad news, I feel like a fat fucking miserable whale that doesn’t feel like doing their goddamn exploitative tricks for the stupid ass crowd at Seaworld today.”
Never once did a man I was fucking respond with anything less than, “AYE YAI, CAPTAIN,” and tread lightly around me for the rest of the day, securing me at least twelve hours of mostly peace and quiet while I sit in a pile of my own melted insides and reflect on everything that ever made me violently angry since the moment I received my guilty verdict and was dragged away to live out my punishment on this shitty planet as someone with a pussy. And bad dental.
Even if I had to be around my man on that dreadful first day, I had the perfect excuse to be my true self that I spent every other moment of my life camouflaging with an elaborate, expertly-crafted charade: Miserable, mean, and displeased with everything that wasn’t their doing or fault and probably completely out of their control!
A dick starts to come alive against my bloated, cramping belly?
“Abso-fucking-lutely not,” something that sounds like me if my natural speaking voice was demonically multi-demensional growls as his dick retreats so far inward that the tip tickles his own tonsils, for once.
“Ar-are you…d-do you…need…anything? Are y-you…h-h-hungry, maybe?” He stammers, barely above a whisper, recoiling in preparation to defend himself against any physical blows like a goddamn idiot.
His flagrant display of unnecessary fear would only piss me off more if I wasn’t, in fact, VERY FUCKING HUNGRY, thank you for FINALLY FUCKING NOTICING my BABY FUCKING BOO, it was nice of you to FUCKING ASK, and in the blink of an eye, we’re at the Captain D’s drive-thru window, I’m too occupied with devouring my fish and fries meal with four extra tartar sauces to spew any irrevocable words of hatred about his deepest insecurities for at least five minutes, and I don’t have to fret over my pussy sweat reeking of deep-fried Cod later because the pool’s closed to visitors for the day!
….Alas, seeing as I currently do not have a steady dick supplier, both of these upsides are nugatory and I hate every part of this: I have blown diarrhea out my tender asshole four times this morning, I will absolutely throw up blood-streaked liquor from the twelve ibuprofen I downed scraping my stomach lining raw, they closed my local Captain D’s and I’d make the 40 minute trek to the nearest one if some goddamn waste of breath man hadn’t totaled my car, and I am tired.
I did get to write this without the interruption of texting someone back about a part of their day that I do not care about, though. That was nice; I am not.
ROSE DAMIAN 