Blood Month, 1979
The world doesn't stop when someone dies. You want it to. You damned well pray it will. But it doesn't. It just keeps going. Unthinkingly. The moon still turns in the sky, the sun still rises, the air still moves in and out of your lungs, the blood in and out of your capillaries. Your body breathes and builds. Despite you.
If I could have told my body to stop when my sister died, I would have. I would have folded it up like an old gray t-shirt and stuffed it in the back of the closet. Left it there for five years. At least five years, because it takes longer than that to heal. But five years respite would have been better than five minutes. Only bodies aren't like that. They're like the sun and the wind. Like fields of red soil and the rain. At once strange and familiar. We can pattern their cycles, but we can't control them. They're moon-governed. Stir-crazy.
First published in My Little Red Book, edited by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, 2006.
A New York Times, best seller, My Little Red Book is an anthology of stories about first periods, collected from women of all ages from around the world. For more information check: www.mylittleredbook.net.