I would think about that for a second. Then I would push my mind to something else.

3 We had pretty much everything we needed in the building, but I was running really low on painkillers. I’d tapered down my use—at first, after finding so many in the pharmacy, I’d gone a little nuts. Then I’d worked my way down to taking them every other day, then every couple of days. It was really goddamn uncomfortable, too, but what are you gonna do? It wasn’t like there were any pharmacies where everything good hadn’t been taken. So I started sobering myself up. I kept a couple for emergencies, but mostly I was clean.

That was a motherfucker. But the real bitch of the situation was that my period started coming back. I guess all the anxiety and discomfort I felt around that unhappy event was part of the reason I started taking painkillers. The added bonus was that being strung out eventually stopped the bleeding altogether, my body just couldn’t get its shit together enough to have a habit and function like that. I mean, I know nobody likes getting their period, it’s not fun for anybody to have blood leaking out of their body, but it induced straight-up panic in me. Having a tampon held inside my body all day for five days made me hyper-aware of my junk, a feeling I tried to avoid at all costs—you don’t even want to get me started on what sex is like for me with about 95 percent of the people I’ve had it with. But you can pick when you have sex or not, most of the time. You can’t pick when your body decides to start dripping blood and tissue everywhere.

The first time I got it in the building, I didn’t know what to do. I was squatted over the piss bucket in the bathroom of our apartment. My pants were down around my ankles and there was this big bright red spot inside my boxers. My breath started coming in a little jagged. I pulled my pants back up and proceeded to freak out.

José and Sebastian are the only ones I really confide in about anything, but they weren’t going to get what I was talking about at all. My hands were shaking a little. After the steady diet of oxys and Xanax, it’d been so long since I’d gotten the fucking thing that I think I had two tampons stored somewhere in one of the pockets of my knapsack. That was it. I tried to think of asking someone if there were any around the building. Then I started thinking about how that would get people thinking about my junk, which, based on the inappropriate questions they ask me about it, people think about more than the average person’s junk. Then I would be thinking more about my junk, which was pretty much unavoidable in the situation anyway, but sure as hell didn’t need to be exacerbated more. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.