Two Essays

By Kaleena Madruga

“Marked”

1. 1. For the four of us: Mom, Dad, Ryder and me.

2. My parents had me young—not teenage young, but young enough to need help. I was passed off to my grandmother many days, and I loved it. I was the favorite, the first-born granddaughter, something she felt she deserved after raising three boisterous boys on her own. I don’t know what it’s like to not have a father. I know what it’s like to have a father, but one that never wants to be around you, one who hits you when he comes home from fishing trips, one who lets you down over and over. Such was the case for my father’s father, my grandmother’s husband. She left him. She took her three boys and she left him and she worked multiple jobs and she probably cried when she was alone. When I was born she helped my parents buy a house for me to grow up in. She told me she will always do whatever she can to help, to make my life wonderful. No one has ever hurt me the way people and the universe and fate or whatever you want to call it has hurt her, yet I have never found a speck of the kindness inside myself that she always had. Effortless. She lost all her hair from chemicals and she choked to death; her lungs stopped working. She was in pain and I couldn’t hug her and I couldn’t see her and before I knew it she was gone.

3. I once read about these deep-sea octopi and how the female has a “self-destructive” gland that turns on when she becomes pregnant. She finds a comfortable cave. When it’s time, she lines the interior of the cave with her little eggs. She gently touches them with her tentacles. She keeps them safe. One day, the tiniest little octopi emerge from the eggs, from their cave covering, bouncing into the depths of the ocean. Most of them die that day. In turn, the mother dies, her duty done, nothing but a deflated, beautiful balloon on the ocean floor. I always wonder if the mother octopus knows about the self-destructive gland but goes through with the whole beautiful process, anyway.

4. Most ships are named after women, but mine is named after my brother.

5. Showing your middle finger has long been the symbol for “fuck you.” Mine has a bow; it’s a gift.

6. Pain in a way is bigger than discomfort. Feeling stupid for claiming it as my own.

7. I actually cried a little because it was so ugly. It didn’t take me long to remember that I am temporary, my skin is temporary, my body.

8. Why else would you decorate your ass?

9. I am not an us, I am just a me. I fell asleep during, I was comfortable.

10.  I can write about it, I can act it out, I can give gifts. I can rarely say anything right, anything at all. #10 was your soccer number. Fur immer. German (your birth place: Hamburg) for “forever.” We don’t make it a year. You’re later diagnosed with testicular cancer. You get engaged to a girl with the same name as mine. We don’t have hate in our hearts for each other.

11. The rose is probably my least favorite flower.

12. Drunk, happy, stupid again. I bleed and I laugh and I cry. You had already started your affair by then. When you make a promise to someone, it sticks. For me it does. It’s been almost five years and I still catch your name in the mirror. It used to mock me, it used to taunt me. Somedays I feel the clip in my throat of a broken heart, of everything we were and everything we could have been. I feel guilty when I am reminded of you. It’s always smells: your hair, your shirts. I will lean back into a memory and catch myself before I slip and fall on the floor. I am proud that I have abandoned grief (for the most part) and anger (for the most part). It’s my intention to cross you out with a dark line. I’ve traded you in for meager funds, I’ve broken and burned the remnants of us. I’ve let you go. You were anything but permanent to me.

13. I will allow myself to be funny when it suits me. I will allow myself to embrace things that are cute, silly, child-like. I can be many things. I can be poetic, I can be dark, I can be foolish, I can be brave. I have to remind myself to be playful. Not everything needs an answer, not everything is meant to be understood.

14. Someone once told me that emojis are the hieroglyphics of our generation. It’s my favorite fruit, I’ve never associated it with sexuality, the ass, cunnilingus, the like. I like the smell and the taste and the color.

15. I later told myself that these would be for the two children I wasn’t ready to keep. I used to say I wasn’t strong enough to keep them, but sometimes I think I was stronger by letting them go. Actually, though, at the clinic while I was getting my ultrasound, the nurse said do you want to see the screen and I said no thank you, and a little bit later she said do you want to know how many births there are? I shook my head and she passed me a tissue. I’ve actually let three go, not two.

16. I recall being unable to look your father in the eye at the funeral. I felt guilty for having the ability to smile, to say how are you? What a stupid thing to say: how are you?

17.  My favorite day, which was still a hard day, a day that I remember squinting into the sun telling my mind not to be anxious, just to enjoy it, just to be present. The owner of the camp told us that the elephants will remember you, that when you come back they will put their trunks all over you and remember. It’s all tourists that are probably never coming back here, I said to my ex-husband. Shh, he said back.

18. When my face is red and puffy and my eyes are swollen and my nose congested, I always look at myself in the mirror and say, inside, do you feel better now?

19. What I hate the most about discussions surrounding death and dying is the mention of heaven or angels. I despise sentiments like: she’d be so proud of you, she’s watching over for you. I can bitterly taste my father saying that he prays to her every night. Pray? I spat. You’ve never prayed in your life. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

20. Most bees that you will see in your lifetime are female bees.

21. I shudder when I think about how I looked at you across the bar, the way you told me not to go, that it wasn’t a good idea. I drunkenly rolled my eyes and said I. Don’t. Care. I think you understood even then that I didn’t care if I lived or died, that I was lost in a dark place that made me hard to see. You got on a plane and you lived while I kept trying to die.

22. HELLFIRE. HELLFIRE.

23. The only thing I know for certain about my mother is that she craved oranges when she was pregnant with me. The only thing I know for certain about my father is that he will fight for me.

24. You are an early riser, a hard worker. You are a ray of sunshine early in the morning. You will do great things. You have been seen as someone who will do great things. You will have pride in yourself and will be triumphant after periods of long darkness. You will let your name define you.

 *.    *.    *

“This Is How It Happens”

The ache that settles into the lower part of your abdomen won’t get easier to deal with. It is as if a clawed hand is clenching your insides, and then releasing it slowly, over and over again.

The week before it comes is sometimes worse than the actual bleeding itself. You’re fat and you feel like your skin doesn’t belong to you. Your clothes won’t fit right. You tug at your sleeves and readjust the neckline of your shirt 100 times before giving up and deciding you are hideous. You want to rip your hair out. Your face is puffy and swollen, the hormones are changing you, you’re a monster. You stand in the shower conjuring up potential arguments with anyone and everyone you’ve ever known. You think about the various ways you can viciously snap back if someone says something to piss you off. If you pull in your desk chair too quickly, your swollen breasts will ache and you’ll feel like you’re going to cry. It would be rewarding to peel your own flesh off.

Sometimes you will bleed for four days, and sometimes it will last for nine.

A stranger with a knife is stabbing you from the front, twisting the knife slowly, then using another knife to puncture every part of your spine. You can’t sit up straight, you have to hunch over. You keep thinking it will subside if you find the perfect position. You want to curl into yourself and hide because the pain is so fucking real and it seems like it will never end.

You were only eleven when you bled for the first time.You were on a cruise with your family and you leaked blood through your green bathing suit underneath your white shorts (you leaked through those, too) and when you saw the red you were horrified. In that instant you felt like you smelled completely different.

Period blood is like pennies and rain water and sometimes if a girl walks by you or sits close to you, you can tell if she’s on her period.

Before you started using tampons (which by now you can take out and put in drunk, in the dark, in a Port-o-Potty without thinking) you wore pads. Fat like diapers with a weird smell no matter what the box says the scent is, they make you feel disgusting, absolutely filthy and repulsive. They stick to the inside of your underwear and rest underneath your vagina and ass like you’re a gross, bleeding baby. If you’re in a public restroom and you have to change your pad the sound of the adhesive peeling off your underwear is so loud and horrifying it makes you hate yourself and your body even more.

The pain is terrifying you. Tiny, evil beetles are tearing at your flesh and burying themselves inside your tissue and muscles. Your body is on fire. The crunching and squeezing of your organs is temporary—you know this, you can tell yourself this, but when the ache returns it feels permanent. Blackness, fear, pain. Everything is spinning in the way it feels to be drunk, but you’re not drunk. Not at all. It’s real, the feeling is real, the ache, it’s all real. You kind of want to die but you don’ t want to die—not yet, it’s going to end. It has to end.

Your doctor, who is an old man, says that the cramps are normal and the pain is part of it and you don’t say anything but there is no way what you’re feeling is normal. You’re grinding your teeth so hard to keep from crying—how can he not hear it? Your mom puts her hand on your back and moves it up and down and you feel like you’re going to crumble into a million pieces. At home you writhe in bed and scream, the pain is so unbearable. Your mom brings you a heating pad and pretty soon you have hot pain. The blood is running out of you, it’s on your shorts and your sheets, you are so fucking hot and you’re lying in your own blood but you can’t get up, it hurts too much to move. You turn over and vomit on the floor, the bile dripping down your chin while your back spasms. You groan and cry and groan and cry for a week. You’re too fragile and sick and broken to go to school. Your parents look helpless.

Do you think she’s overreacting a bit?, the doctor asks. You know, for attention?

The doctor finally says to go on birth control so you can at least anticipate the pain and control the length and amount of bleeding. You’re only thirteen and terrified to stick a tampon inside you. Your mom asks if you want her to do it for you and you scream no.

You swallow a tiny pill every day and the bleeding is lighter, but the cramps are the same. Imagine the crown of thorns Jesus Christ wore on his head during the crucifixion. Imagine someone wrapping a belt of thick, pointed daggers around your hips, your low back, right under your belly button. Imagine someone using both hands to press the sharp edges into you. This is how it feels. After a few hours of stabbing, squeezing, mind-numbing agony the pain turns into a dull ache, like a heavy rock is sitting on your uterus pushing you down under the water. You keep breathing. You are sweating and your scalp is soaked and you reek, but somehow this is a little bit better.

At night you have vivid thoughts about killing yourself. You imagine dragging blades down the insides of your wrists. You visualize throwing yourself off a bridge. Slamming your head into a wall over and over until your brain falls out of your ears.

Your doctor says on the plus side you will be better prepared for labor pain. You’re overwhelmed by the desire to physically harm him.

If you take the pills you will want to kill yourself, but if you don’t take the pills you will feel like you are dying for at least five days. These are your choices.

A boy you like invites you to go swimming but you’re bleeding a lot and you can’t wear a massive pad with your swimsuit. You feel the tears coming and you think about making up an excuse but something pushes you toward the bathroom and you find a tampon and look at the diagrams from the pamphlet inside the box. You put your leg on the toilet seat; you’re terrified to touch your own vagina. You take a deep breath and try not to clench, not to tighten up, and you stick it in where you think it goes. It takes a few tries but suddenly everything opens up and you are completely different than you thought you were before. You forget what you’re supposed to do for a second and the applicator is just sitting inside you, waiting. You slowly, slowly, slowly pull it out and begin to move around. It’s in there, you know it is, but you can’t feel it.

A common sentiment in the practice of yoga is understanding the difference between pain and discomfort. Discomfort can manifest as an ache, an unfamiliar stretch, the expression of opening—something new, foreign. You should welcome discomfort, it means you are growing. Pain, on the other hand, is sharp. Pain is quick. You are meant to back away from pain, shirk away from a stabbing sensation. Pain means that you have pushed your body beyond its boundaries. Welcome discomfort, run away from pain.

A few years later on a trip you forget if you have a tampon in or not and you dig around (you are not as disgusted by yourself now) and you can’t find the string, can’t pull anything out, so you put another one in. You spend your entire vacation thinking you have two tampons inside you (at least).

Sometimes you end up pulling out your tampon before it’s ready, and the walls of your vagina throb in pain. You imagine a tampon with tiny fingernails dragging along your insides, so you try to gently guide it out. You feel like you’ve been punched in the gut.

A used tampon looks like a dead mouse. The stained absorbent swings back and forth as you hold the dainty string between your fingers, trying not to drop it. Like you’ve done a thousand times before, you place the bloody tampon on some toilet paper, wrap it up, and stuff it in the little silver box next to the toilet.

You will have to negotiate which applicator to use next, because you’re not done bleeding yet. Your vagina is still pulsing in pain from the tampon’s removal. You have to get the lubricated applicators, not the cardboard ones. Those times you’ve used a cardboard applicator make you instantly feel dry and like you’re chewing on a box. The instinct to clench your walls is inescapable and now you’re basically shoving a toilet paper roll up inside yourself. The lubricated ones are usually pink or blue or green and they glide up inside you but the tampons themselves are smaller and soak quicker and you usually have to change them every hour. If you stand up too fast or sneeze you will feel like a human geyser and have to sprint to the bathroom to make sure you’re not leaking all over yourself.

Despite the fact that sex is said to be pleasurable, it’s killing you. A dark ache at the base of your spine knocks you out with each thrust. You keep thinking it will subside, you’ll get used to it, but you’re slipping further into the pain. Avoiding sex won’t keep a partner around, looking uncomfortable and grimacing during sex won’t keep a partner around. Attempting to explain what’s happening inside your body to a partner will never work.

Still, you can have sex on your period if the guy isn’t grossed out but it’s better when you put a towel down first. You try to remember to always turn the lights off, because if he sees blood on his dick he’s probably going to freak out, even if he tells you it’s cool.

You have sex when you’re not on your period and this time the condom breaks and you say it’s fine, it’s definitely fine, we are fine but then your period never comes. You have cramps and they are painful but these are different. They roll like a massive wave up and down your body and you squirm in your bed and bite on your knuckles because it hurts so bad and something is different, something is wrong.

Despite the fact that this condition frequently causes infertility, this is the one symptom you’ve missed. You’re special. You pee on a stick and two lines show up which means you are pregnant so of course you wish you had a period right now more than anything. You would trade this in for cramps for two weeks, three weeks, a year—you don’t care.

You have to get this ball of cells sucked out of you and the nurse says the sound is kind of upsetting and to try not to think about it and she hands you a tissue because your eyes are leaking. You’re glad she’s a woman but you’re scared, you have no idea what this will feel like, if it will hurt. Your hands are shaking.

You’re getting a needle stuck in your arm and you’re starting to relax but you’re still crying. It doesn’t hurt but it doesn’t feel right. You tell the suction doctor thank you after it’s done and he puts a hand on your arm and smiles at you like you’re his daughter. You don’t know if he’s sad for you or this little almost baby, but he’s just doing his job. The nurse gives you a pad and some juice. She leaves you with a stack of paperwork that says you might bleed for up to two weeks and you’re not allowed to put a tampon in in case of infection and you’re truthfully, honestly, just so upset that you have to wear a pad again.