11

I WON’T GIVE DETAILS about the retreat, but there is something I’ll try to narrate. I could start with the anecdotal: I cried for three days, this fondness of mine for crying. But I also can’t say that this cry was just a cry. It could have been the meticulous sound of the phagocytosis. Of a pain that fed off me to become something else. The similarity and difference of this pain that came back to me in disconnected moments, as if the nucleus of my being began to violently disintegrate, showing me there wasn’t anything: no center, no possibility of identifying myself. I hated and loved understanding this is what happens, love gave way to hatred, forging love always meant forging hatred, fucking hell, but it isn’t so simple to differentiate the two in this amalgam, you get lost. There’s something concrete around this cry that eludes anecdote. Something like a revelation that took place not in the thoughts that stray but in the colorful flesh or substance, I don’t know. We were in the middle of the jungle. A wild place. At a retreat that wasn’t spiritual or experiential or any of that bullshit. I don’t know what it was, I still can’t say what it was about. Or what the leftovers of my blood in a delicate screen that functioned as a filter in the latrine meant. A clump of coagulated blood on the screen, my fingers grabbing it so it wouldn’t clog the plumbing and burying it in the grass. There wasn’t a bathroom. There wasn’t a shower. No amenities. I’d started bleeding again, like I bled back then: gushing and not understanding how losing so much blood was normal and wasn’t killing me. In my catastrophic fantasies, those that occupied a large part of my interior world, those that if they were to stop would mean the end of everything, because I am catastrophic fantasizing, I imagined emptying out, turning pale, and dying from so much blood leaving my vagina. I imagined my wake, my burial, the lives of others continuing without me, and the pleasureful image of being idealized and supreme revived me. I really bled solid. Pieces of me that had solidified in ways I couldn’t understand, chunks of entrails that left the sensation of a hole inside me. It seemed like nothing was left after each period, but then it would come back the following month and dismember me with pieces that sometimes became dust, sometimes those pieces were dry red dust that I watched accumulate like a mountain of sand on my white pads. I woke up that first morning of the retreat and felt the blood come, but the blood flowed not only with that intensity but also a deep repressed sensation like opening a door and feeling the storm, the hail that again nears and that is going to come in kicking the body, ripping open ancient wounds, breaking mugs and glasses, vomiting little white acid pills on those wounds to scratch the skin so that everything is then blood on blood.