My period ended a few days ago, but I still technically have one newsletter to go, so I’m here to close this out. I disappeared because I actually injured myself. I pulled my right shoulder moving things around in the garage and couldn’t move my arm properly for a few days. All exacerbated by having to go into the office. Not just any office, but a new one with new people, all of whom my brain was working overtime to analyze and decipher. It was an altogether miserable week with the pain and the heat, and the early stages of change manifested. Of course it will get better and I’ll end up loving all of these new people. Right now, I think they’re freaks.

We celebrated my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary yesterday and I didn’t have to reach far into my memory for a related period story. It’s funny. My mom never talked to us about periods when we were growing up and learning how to navigate them, but once we became adults, once we were safely in the know of our own making, she didn’t hold back and would intimate details. Just one of her many idiosyncrasies that’s often made me wonder how things are filed away in her brain. Anyway, she told me more than once that she got her period on the day of her wedding and was fretting about it. Her older sister she was living with calmed her down and talked her through how to tell my dad, who is a champ when it comes to body talk. Maybe my mother helped develop him in that area, but he’s also a trained farmer, specifically in pig husbandry, so I think he was woke to body stuff early on and sees it all as beautiful. The period story doesn’t go much further than that. The funny thing is, my sister had the same experience, which makes me think I will too.

It’s anxiety-inducing to tell a man you’re with about your period though. Not anymore now that I’ve crested 40, but when you’re very young and dating, it can be nerve-wracking because you don’t know how they’ll respond, and if they don’t respond well, it tells you something pretty damning about them you don’t want to find out when you’re falling in love. Isn’t that funny? The stuff we should want to know the most about the other person we resist finding out about. I’m the opposite now. If you’re an asshole, I want to know immediately. Otherwise you’re muckin’ up my alone time.

I consider myself lucky that I’ve never had a truly terrible man in my life who made me feel bad about my period, other than that one I wrote about early on who had a problem with me talking about it. And he’s not a terrible person. We can chalk it up to being young and stupid. The nicest experience I had was with an older man I dated for many years who was coming over one weekend. It was early days and excitement was in the air, so before he drove over I let him know, “Hey! Just so you know: blah.” And he replied excitedly after a moment, “Well, we can still have lunch!” He ended up staying the whole weekend, and we made sandwiches and watched movies. I thought he was the most beautiful man for that. A standard-setter.

Anyway, thank you all for reading this and, more importantly, for supporting my unhinged writing experiments. Earlier in the week, Reader “A” wrote in: “I feel like I can hear your true voice.” I was over the moon about that because that’s all I’m trying to do as a writer. I want to write in such a way that if you met me, if you and I had lunch, you’d feel no different talking to me than reading this. (Because is that not the most non-AI, punk rock, writerly existence possible?)

Thank you so much for reading! My plan with this small body of writing is to read through it again in a week or so and identify spots that deserve more. I can tell you right now the bit about purity deserves a lot more, and I have been tumbling it around in my head. I knew at the outset I couldn’t do that justice in this format, but also that I’ve avoided writing about it altogether until now because it’s a beast of a topic rife with landmines. At least I got over that startup friction, but it deserves a lot more and we’ll get there.

A reader suggested turning this into a zine and that is definitely in the plan as well, especially since I’m working on a TOP SECRET small press project. More to come on that via dispatches in Somethingburger, my regular all-the-time newsletter. You can subscribe to Somethinburger via my website here.

Finally, please write your own pop-up newsletters for me to read! That weird idea in your head…just go for it. I’ll be your first ardent subscriber.