Maybe I was just tired of bleeding, I say to my husband the morning after my hysterectomy. He has brought me toast and weak tea. I am lying in our bed petting our cat Schrödinger.

            Jess, he says, it was bit a more than that. He puts down the breakfast tray next to the cat and heads back downstairs.

            He is probably right, I say to Schrödinger. Quint is usually right. Still and all, I never did care much for the bleeding. It didn’t help that I started so much earlier than my friends. I was barely nine and got my first period at recess. I wasn’t even aware that girls bled. It was my dumb  luck that Richard Atwell’s dad was a gynecologist and Richard announced to the whole fourth grade that I had started menstruating. 

            Reflecting back on all of it now, it strikes me as terribly sad that I was always so ashamed of my body, the swelling and the hair and the blood. I was supposed to be tightlipped – what an expression. What a metaphor. Mom handed me a Wal-Mart shopping bag with boxes of Kotex and I could have made better sense out of being handed the Dead Sea Scrolls. You’re a smart girl, Jessica; read the directions on the box, my mother said. No further instruction. I suffered embarrassing accidents almost monthly for the rest of that school year. It wasn’t until summer, at Girl Scout sleepover camp, when Jenny Hill brought a calendar with her that I understood I did not have to wait in agonizing horror for the next blood to come. The red dot on July 16^th marked her last period and the green dot roughly four weeks later signified her next. Planning, she said. Later that will be important when I am married and planning on babies, Jenny confided. Jenny Hill was catholic but her mother was an obstetrician.

            It was so simple really. I was good at planning. Upon returning home from camp, I told Mom I needed a calendar and a box of markers. I never had another accident again. I certainly didn’t embrace bleeding and I didn’t relish the idea of having babies but I found a new power. I started planning my escape. I mapped myself a future, brighter and less bloody, far away from a home littered with empty vodka bottles and cigarette butts. My planning took me to Quiz Bowls and forensic debates and quickly enough to an academic scholarship from a lovely school where the girls wore pearls and the boys had roman numerals after their surnames.

            It was at said school that I met Quinton. How odd that I began to bleed, unexpectedly, unplanned the night we met. I probably should’ve realized then that the cavity of me had begun its slow fester but at 21 what could I have known? I was as clueless then as I had been at 9, hanging upside down from the monkey bars in soiled shorts.

            Later, after graduations and first jobs, and LSATs and law school and engagement and a hasty marriage and an ectopic pregnancy, later after the D&C, we would hear the word cancer. The word uterine. Hysterectomy. Hyster. Hysterical. I had always loved etymology but this was a bit too on the nose for me. I was stoic. I took it all in with more recognition than realization. While Quinton drove us home, weeping silently hunched over the steering wheel, undoubtedly mentally bidding goodbye to long-desired tow-headed toddlers, I pressed the seat warmer button. I began planning my bloodless future.

A version of this story was first published in Sledgehammer Lit in April 2021.