a period piece
rating: +10+x

tw: menstruation, mentions of blood, referenced sexism and transphobia, depictions of violence

You wake up in a puddle of blood.

All of it is yours, but you are not injured or wounded. Instead, you merely groan and mutter about changing bedsheets and recording cycles before you blunder off to the toilet, clutching your lower torso. The waning moon signaled the red-hot tide, sweeping you away in a deluge of persistent pain and spiraling sensation.

It is only three at dawn, and you are trying not to wake up too much so you can fall back asleep.

It wasn’t that bad. Honestly, if you put your mind to something else and focused on anything, everything except your body, it was mostly fine. Detachment is good, actually.

There were signs before it happened, always, but at this point you are so out of touch with your body which screamed so clearly that you are a girl. It insisted on it, marched over to you, shoved you down as its bloody hands held your head to the floor as it brutally revealed the circumstances of your birth. Each month your own body betrays you and you are reduced to nothing but what is between your legs.

Your body. You naively thought that you had taken full ownership of who you are but clearly not, how could you hold him/her in full esteem and act like that is your body? If you are ashamed of it then it is clearly not yours. You’re just living in it.

When someone refuses to surrender to the person they were born as, they must fight themselves to the very end. You know this too well.

You lunge for the sanitary napkin, tearing it apart and discarding the wrapper adorned with you go, girl and slamming it onto your still-bloody boxers.

They say that a man who bleeds is no man at all. But do not all men shed blood in War? And what activity is more manly than thrusting your spear into the body of another, feeling their breath as their life drips out onto the floor, watching their eyes as they glaze over? Being a man consists too often of violence, dealt with and dealt unto another, even— no, especially if that other is yourself.

Period blood is the only kind of blood not shed though violence, but though life. Perhaps that is why they will not accept us.

Before you know it, the bed welcomes your weary body with a warm embrace, and you fall back asleep.

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