Phantom Tampon

Still from the film, Phantom Thread.

Tampons are trance-inducing. Maybe not at first, but for seasoned menstruators like myself, inserting and removing tampons is a monthly four day gig you’ve had for twenty years with zero opportunity for growth. There isn’t a superior sanguinary position to aspire to, like High Priestess of the Scarlet Pools, so the vibe is more getting high and rewinding VHS tapes at Blockbuster. If the promotion is a wanted pregnancy, even if you ace your pregnancy and nail having the baby, you still have to go right back to working the line at sad Aunt Flo’s dustbowl factory until your retirement, when you are then banished to a hot house.

At best, the tampon ritual is meditative. Chop wood, carry water. Speaking of carrying liquid, yes I tried switching to a Diva Cup. Everyone swore it was so easy to squish and shove that rubber goblet up there and simply twist until you feel the magic click, like the gas cap on my Hyundai, but my persnickety vagina rejected the silicone chalice. I failed to un-tilt my Diva Cup. It remained wedged sideways inside me, like a flying saucer stuck in the catacombs leaking its occult fuel, so I had to hop back on the tampon train.

The string is the proof of life in the tampon game. If you metaphorically got too high at Blockbuster, you simply reach down and feel for the string dangling from your labia like a mouse tail. If it looks and feels like you might be smuggling Stuart Little out of the country, you did put a tampon in. It’s in there. If you don’t feel the string, then the call is coming from inside the house.

Psychological warfare ensues. You try retracing your steps, but the Blockbuster days bleed into Blockbuster nights and now you’re the guy in Memento.

••••

I frantically started rooting around in my sacred yoni, or my smart little meat wallet, whatever you prefer to call it, and texted my sister with my other hand.

Lily, I … I think I might be having a Hurricane Harbor situation.

Even without context, Hurricane Harbor is a fitting code name for this, but I wasn’t being clever. Hurricane Harbor is the name of the waterpark where fifteen-year-old Lily luged herself down a 300 foot water slide causing her tampon to hurricane straight up into her harbor.

I kept foraging my snatch. I should mention I was one hundred percent going to have sex that night. I was going to have the kind of sex I wanted to have with the person I wanted to have it with. A miracle. A miracle that could be thwarted by the wrath of Hurricane Harbor.

I texted Lily again.

I’m rummaging around in here but my fingers aren’t that long. How did you get yours out??

Or did I really not put one in?? Gasp … maybe this is a Phantom Tampon.

••••

Lily’s response was useless to me because I’ll never be this cool. She texted:

I played a double header and it came out with the string wrapped all the way around it in the bathroom at Baja Fresh.

Listen sister, I don’t have time for your fastpitch softball vaginal glory days! I’m having sex tonight, haven’t you heard??

I kept getting ready. I had no choice. I had to be at my almost-boyfriend’s place by five because he’d planned a surprise for me. He told me to save this date a while ago which made me feel all the way special and here it was. Let’s call my almost-boyfriend David Sedaris, because that is what the surprise was. My thoughtful, heterosexual, almost-boyfriend, David Sedaris, was taking me to see the one and only David Sedaris at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium because he knew how much I admired his writing. Wasn’t that nice of David Sedaris?

••••

When I got into his car, David Sedaris told me I looked really pretty. I squinted and said, “Look, David, I’m hoping this is a Phantom Tampon but it might be a for real Hurricane Harbor.”

He understood right away and this was so sweet, David Sedaris asked if I wanted him to try to fish it out of me after we see David Sedaris live at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. I said, “Oh god yes, thank you. I was going to ask because your fingers are longer than mine.” He put his hand on my thigh. I looked at those truly long fingers and said, “Maybe I should write an essay about going to see David Sedaris while being psychologically tortured by a log-jammed tampon. It kind of sounds like a David Sedaris essay.” David Sedaris laughed, taking my hand. He kissed my knuckles and said, “That does sound like a David Sedaris essay.”

••••

We were really early and then we were almost late because my almost-boyfriend loves two things: ice cream and women’s asses. There we were, strolling to the venue after dinner. I was doing some pretty funky pelvic floor exercises trying to reprise my sister’s Babe Ruth Baja Fresh performance and David Sedaris was admiring how adept my ass was at filling out my skirt. Suddenly, his eyes darted up from my ass onto an ice cream parlor door. He marveled, “Oh wow look, this ice cream comes with cookies.”

Time stands still for my almost-boyfriend when it comes to ice cream, which is why we ended up sprinting through downtown Pasadena holding cafeteria trays with towers of cookies and ice cream teetering on them like champagne flutes on the Titanic. We looked like we had never been to Pasadena. We looked like we had never been to a show. We looked like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon and when I saw him lean over a trashcan to house the pornographic trough of dessert sloshing from his tray, I realized: I was totally in love with David Sedaris.

••••

We dumped our trays and found our seats in the balcony. David Sedaris leaned over and whispered, “We’re the dumbest people in here.” I told him to speak for himself. It wasn’t that stuffy of a crowd to begin with, but even if it was, I am no longer intimidated by NPR windbags or Ivy League snots. Sure, instead of going to college I took acting classes in a basement, but I would counter with: Brett Kavanagh went to Yale. Yale should be embarrassed, not me.

And there were dumb people in the audience. There was a belligerent woman a few rows from us who shouted down to David Sedaris, spotlit and alone on his stage. “Who’s your favorite sister?” He didn’t respond so she shouted it twice, even though one of his sisters died by suicide. Tiffany, who I think about all the time. David Sedaris stood still in his $900 polka dot culottes. “Well, I’ll think I’ll go with Gretchen because she has stage four cancer and I love her.” Maybe he didn’t say those exact words, maybe I’m not remembering it correctly, but that was the gist of it. I wanted to throw this woman from the balcony but I also wanted her to never change. I like that trashy people come out to see David Sedaris. It means people still know how to read.

“It’s so refreshing that David Sedaris doesn’t know what an Erewhon is,” I said to David Sedaris on the car ride home. “His only experience with Erewhon is they let him use the bathroom when he really needed to pee. He was like, ‘that place is great, definitely go support the Erewhon store in Pasadena.’ I don’t know why it felt almost medicinal to hear it, I just really love that he has no idea what an Erewhon is.”

David Sedaris didn’t really get what I was saying there, but we pulled up to his place. It was time. Time to either perform Hurricane Harbor extraction surgery or time to bust the ghost tampon in my vagina.     

•••• 

I lay down on the side of your bed that was almost mine. You’d never let it really be mine. Your brain labeled me a threat to your environment, like it labeled many things in your house. Your clothes were wrapped in plastic. Your shoes in zip lock bags. The bed was pulled away from the headboard mounted to the wall. Anything with fabric was lethal. You believed the bed was probably infected too. Anything with dust, because of the microscopic mites, was lava, including the floor so you always wore spa slippers. We couldn’t sit on your leather arm chairs until you’d wiped them down with Clorox wipes before every sitting. We never sat outside on your beautiful deck because the patio furniture had cushions and cushions weren’t safe. You were trapped in a circular hell of stress-induced itching and itching-induced stress. You are allergic to the earth and the sky. You are also imprisoned by a nervous system that perpetually harms you. This is why our love lost the war. It was a miracle you let me in as much as you did. Not really. It was a miracle I made possible because of my empathy and my patience. I was a slutty saint with you and don’t you ever forget it. You made a tragic mistake when you left me. You cheated yourself out of the best love you’ll ever get and you cheated me too. It is a tragedy. A Greek tragedy, like actual David Sedaris’s father. 

I lay there on your fragmented bed, reaching for the gorgeous Art Deco headboard on the wall, aching to reunite them. I listened to you down the hall, carefully clipping  your nails and washing your hands like you were scrubbing in for surgery. I think you brought out a towel. We were already laughing. You lay down with me and made me feel so safe and delighted and cared about. We were beaming, but the way you beam is still melancholic. Your eyes are rare and exactly the same as mine. Copper bleeding into green. Sunflowers pressed against sea glass. We have the same eyeballs. You’d have to go full Oedipus Rex to successfully get me out of your head. You hovered over me and I called you Doctor, like every other basic idiot in love, with a Phantom Tampon in her would have called you. You started the examination. It was painless. It was glorious.        

I looked down and saw the look on your face and I’ve just never loved anyone the way I loved you in that moment and it will never be repeated. Your face was glowing with scrunched determination. You were squinting into the heavens, searching for the Grail. You were the Once and Future King, under the tutelage of Merlin, reaching into mystic chambers for the sword in the stone. And you found it. I mean nothing was in there but you found it. I imagine you looked just like those 16th century Italian anatomists, Falloppio and Colombo, when they “discovered” the clitoris. Dashing and curious, wrist-deep in their almost-girlfriends who remain uncredited. 

The tampon was an apparition but it turned our love real. The love was the alchemy of all of our failures. It was breathtaking, which is what you once called me. You were referring to my naked body at the time. If it was only my body you found breathtaking and not the depth of our connection, that’s fine. As I said, you will have to tear out your eyes to be free of my perspective.

It was right for me to go on this cervical ghost hunt with you and you alone. I’m too old to be mistaken. I know how the exact opposite of this feeling feels. Maybe it has to do with how far I’ve come, how much I’ve “healed.” Gross. Maybe I could do this phantasmic procedure with someone else. Maybe the need will arise if I yet again lose my place rewinding tapes at the liminal Blockbuster. But I can’t imagine feeling that safe or at home with anyone else. It had so much to do with you. With who you are and how you were with me. It had everything to do with the force field of strange beauty we conjured together.

I looked down at you and wanted you with me for every medical procedure. I wanted you there, holding my hand for the c-section I may never have. I wanted to show you how to mirror a baby and I wanted the baby to be ours. I wanted to keep crying and laughing into your mouth which I know sounds grotesque but felt incredible. I wanted to cradle your heart and fix your house. I wanted to keep you safe and give you peace. I wanted to push your bed back up against the wall. I wanted to help you recognize what to discard and what to keep, but you kept everything that didn’t matter and threw away the only precious thing you had. Maybe you were always just reaching inside me for something you couldn’t feel.

Whatever the case, you are violating our eternal soul contract, and it’s hard to get a lawyer for that. I’ve tried. If I never find karmic legal representation, if we never find our way back to each other, I hope you know I will always love David Sedaris. Especially his later stuff.