Perimenopause

I don’t want to have another child, yet neither do I want the possibility of having another taken from me. In Persian mythology, a Peri is a winged spirit known for her beauty, at times mischievous, at times benevolent. If I listen to my body, I can hear hundreds of moody wings beating inside of me on iterations of the shoulders of the women I have been and even the babies I have lost. My first period started in a planetarium. The distance from the Earth to the sun is an astronomical unit, and I sometimes think of the growing space between each phase this way. The period before my father died happened unexpectedly in the hospital. His night nurse handed me a maternity pad. I put it on and thought about those initial days after giving birth, how a clot the size of a grapefruit was cause for concern but a tomato wasn’t. I had already stained the chair I was curled up on, so I got a wet paper towel and wiped it down in view of the stars visible from the window my father was no longer aware of. His delirium meant we weren’t alone, that spirits surrounded us. We talked to them together, and as I bled, I told him what I remembered of the planet Mercury, named after the winged God, how it moves quickly around the sun but spins slowly on its axis. Life is like that, the days long and the years short, or the days short and the years long, depending on the exact moment you ask someone.