I don’t even know if I can call what happens a period. Period suggests a finite amount of time, a decisive ending, a stop. And so I suppose that if I interpret the meaning as stopping the blood that continues to leak, unabated, from my uterus, with every major break-up, then yes, it’s my period, but my period on steroids, an energizer bunny of a period, a veritable river so robust I can never fathom where it is all coming from.

I bled for thirty-three days after I ended my relationship with Raymundo, and left the Yucatán Peninsula two months earlier than planned, returning home to no job and no apartment, the only constant the torrential wave of blood that coursed, seemingly endlessly, from between my thighs. By the time I boarded a plane back to California, I felt desperate to get away from Raymundo’s sweaty, toxic presence, his fake liberalism, undergirded with a weighty Catholic insistence that I repent my San Francisco party girl days, his pleading that I stay in México and marry him.

I had barely dropped my bags at my parents’ house before I booked an urgent appointment with my OB/GYN, certain, after what had been nearly three weeks of steady bleeding, multiple boxes of super tampons disappearing at a shocking rate, that something was dreadfully wrong. Dr. Perry was thorough and kind, and after an extensive exam and a battery of tests, she sat me down.

“The good news is,” she said, “I can’t find anything wrong. No polyps, no fibroids, no indication of any kind of damage. Your tissue is healthy, and your blood pressure is great. You are,” she added, “a touch anemic, but that’s not surprising considering the duration of the bleeding. Do you eat red meat?”

I nodded, unsure how to feel.

“Good. Eat a steak. Spinach, or other leafy greens. I could also prescribe you an iron pill to help you feel less depleted. I think it will stop eventually. If there’s no change in ten days, come on back in.”

My body seemed to be betraying me. For the first time in my life, I used pads, my poor chafed pussy too miserable to entertain the prospect of yet another tampon. What the hell was happening?

The second deluge occurred fifteen years later, immediately after telling my then husband I wanted a divorce. The onslaught of cramping, heavy bleeding interspersed with short lulls, and dark clots that emerged with each fresh round of flow was so dense I would soak through a super tampon in less than thirty minutes. I didn’t go to the doctor. Though once again the intensive flood, day after day, was unpleasant and exhausting, there was something that felt familiar, like a message, my body calling out to me from some dark place, some kind of internal faucet twisted on to full by my subconscious, deciding for me that my body needed a release.

A cleanse.

And this time, after twenty-some-odd days, when the barrage slowed to a trickle, and then disappeared completely, I felt a shift. A lightness. I had been holding on so tight, pressing down the knowledge that I was deeply unhappy for years. I suffered from indigestion, constipation, migraine, and sties. And then poof. After I bled and bled, and bled some more, the rest of my body systems, which had felt clogged with bloat and infection, sluggish and corroded, began to clear, as if debris long stagnating in a water wheel was finally flung free, and fresh water churned cold and blue and fresh. And I realized that what the hell was happening was a gift, a knowing in my body, a deep knowing in my core, in my cells, that something need to move through, and out.

So I started to listen better. To my body. When my belly churned. When I had a headache for three days in a row. I recognized, finally, how much stress and emotional upset impacted my physical body, and that sometimes (often), my body already knew truths that my brain and heart stubbornly refused to acknowledge.

Last year, when my lover and partner of seven years left me with no notice, no warning, I had already started bleeding two days prior. Some part of me must have known. My spidey sense. My lizard brain. That ancient fight or flight instinct. I bled for a month. I bled out my shock, and grief, and anger. The ongoing presence of the blood refused to let me pretend away my pain, a vivid red reminder of the terrible breaking that was happening in my life. And in a weird, uncomfortable, messy way, I was grateful.

-Lindsay Michele

After earning an English Literature degree in San Francisco, Lindsay spent ten years in the classroom, teaching teenagers how to write. Now, after completing her MFA in Creative Fiction from Mills at Northeastern, she focuses on her own craft. Lindsay is the recipient of the Amanda Davis MFA Thesis in Fiction Prize, and the Melody Clarke Teppola Creative Writing Prize in Fiction. She has a forthcoming short story in the literary magazine Drunk Monkeys. Lindsay recently completed her first novel, and is hard at work on the sequel.