To Do with the Body

I showed up at the Museum of Period Clothes dressed like a revolutionary bayonetsman, like an idiot. All around me framed in glass were dresses hard with blood.

Normally I could have laughed off my mistake, but right then I was at the stage of heartbreak when failing to put on fitted sheets the right way could land me crying at the foot of the bed with the comforter in a heap. In that stage I never did anything but think of you. Get out of here, my roommate had said that morning when I tried to describe the eggs you used to crack for breakfast, go get dressed, go to a museum, come back when you can talk about anything else.

So there I stood in the entryway of red-brown skirts, holding a steak knife taped to a broomstick, confronting a sign that said: HOW MUCH BLOOD HAVE YOU LET?

That was something else to talk about. I calculated. I was twenty-eight and had had 156 periods in my life. That’s 780 days of bleeding. Two full years of blood.

I thought that might interest you. I called you up. I was surprised that you answered. You had said you wouldn’t answer me anymore, because the woman you loved had told you you couldn’t answer me anymore, but I always did suspect that she only had half a hold on you. Even no you couldn’t follow through with, when it came to me.

You agreed to meet me at the Museum of Period Clothes. You didn’t bother asking why there, though I’d prepared a reason. You were an important period, to me. You would not have pushed me further.

When you arrived, my eyes were a bayonet straight to my gut. You looked like you. Because I was in the middle of losing you—as I will always be in the middle of losing you; it’s too far in to be the beginning but it will never end—I’d thought you might look different. I’d worn a costume that went back in time 250 years. I thought perhaps the loss of me might have disjointed your chronology, too, that you’d be dressed up like a space robot or a fig leaf, but you were wearing blue jeans and a red tee-shirt and you stained my whole heart purple.

“Hello,” you said, as if you could say any old thing, goodbye or nice morning or wow you’re alive. At least you didn’t say how are you.

“Come walk,” I said.

I chose the first room to our left. In little glass fishbowls were the old rags women in the Bible used to sit on, then pads with and without wings, cotton and linen, belts and straps, adhesive and Velcro, tampons and applicators. I wanted to stay there, all that absorption, but you said let’s check out the Hall of What’s Been Ruined: wedding dresses, stockings, an underground storage unit full of underwear, sheets and couches and desk chairs and drivers’ seats and mattresses and stairwell banisters.

HOW DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL? read the signs on thin metallic music stands every few feet. There were little white index cards with little red crayons to draw your feelings. There were understanding female do-cents posted in the doorways to discuss your feelings.

Here is how it made me feel: come back.

Because even when I used to have you, I never had you completely. You were always half with her. Even there, in that Museum that day you came half back to me: I nudged you to answer how does it make you feel but you were texting someone, laughing to yourself. On your screen it said Lina. How is a revolutionary bayonetsman supposed to deal with a betrayal via text. For months when I’d been boring my roommate to death over you, you were having her and laughing. Something about this fact was so evil that I wanted to do evil in response. What merely minor depravity could have possibly matched...