Even the Faintest Light

Her class was at 3:30 p.m. on Fridays. With a short bob cut and brown horn-rimmed glasses, she looked, at first glance, too young to be an instructor. Her voice was somewhat deep and husky. She introduced her course in English, which was the language of instruction for all core classes in the English Literature department.

"In this course you will be writing essays in English," she was saying. I sat imagining the kind of pressure she must feel, teaching in Korean-accented English a group of students that included highly fluent English speakers. She tried to speak clearly, raising her voice for parts she wanted to emphasize.

I understood every word she said.

Once she finished going over the syllabus, she took questions. The most proficient English speakers were the first to raise their hands. She listened carefully to each student, requesting any parts she missed to be repeated, then gave attentive answers. As her class was on a Friday afternoon, I walked into the lecture hall still not knowing if I wanted to take the course or not, but watching her enunciate her thoughts in heavily accented English, dressed in perfectly neutral colors, I had a faint hunch by the end of the Q & A that I was going to like her classes.

For every class, we were to read an essay she selected and submit a page-long review of it. The considerable amount of required reading prompted many students to drop the class during the add/drop period, eventually leaving about fifteen people.

At our first class, we read George Orwell's essay on his time in Burma working as a police officer. She read the essay aloud, providing line-by-line translation.

How should I put this? I liked everything about that class. The dank, cool whiff of the underground lecture hall where moisture had long seeped into the cement; the sensation of writing on a cheap, unlined spiral notebook with a black Plus Pen; the ring of her deep voice resounding across the small hall. I liked the essays she chose, the light-bulb moments when she shed new light on sentences I had glided over. To my joy, the things I knew deep down but didn't have the language for were articulated—a joy, I realized as I quietly sat in class, that was precisely the emotion I had sought for a long time. Sometimes, I found myself in tears for no reason. Perhaps from the thought that I had been lost for too long.

In the second semester of 2009, nine years ago, I was a third-year undergrad transfer student, aged twenty-seven.

_______

It was the fourth week of class. I was on the third day of my period. I tended to have heavy flow on my first and second days. It was rare for it to persist into the third day, and by the fourth it would peter out. When I worked at the bank, I relied on tampons during peak hours when bathroom breaks were hard to take, but using tampons in a public toilet was not an easy maneuver. I'd always had cramps bad enough for medication, but the volume of my flow had never given me trouble.

It was only around the time I'd transferred to the school that it began to be a problem. Sometimes I would have sudden outpourings of blood. While I was always careful, I was on my third day that afternoon and had just changed to a new pad right before class, so I didn't think there'd be any issues.

The lecture ran for three hours without a break, and I was wearing jeans with a short-sleeve shirt. Halfway through the class I felt a leak in my pants. Seated in the last row far away from other students, I couldn't ask anyone for help and didn't even have a jacket to cover my pants. I sat there helplessly as I endured the remainder of class. The rear of my pants was...