Te Deum

I.

When I come in to the National Cathedral I dip my hand in the holy water as I have done a hundred times before. Now I am sitting in the same wooden chapel chairs of every Friday of every school year, watching dusk light percolate through the stained-glass windows as I sink into evening. I have walked miles in the rapturous cold, pressing against this anemic ache. The blond wicker and twill seats are a balm. I was a child the last time I sat here, or ran in circles around the flagpole on the green, or recited poetry in the Bishop’s Garden.

II. 

In our Cathedral-approved white chapel dresses, we can easily discern who has graduated from undershirt to cotton training bra to the thin-strapped satin our mothers wear. We’ve learned about puberty and periods in Health class, and in the lunch line a classmate has just asked if I’ve started mine. I haven’t, although her tentative question tells me that she has. I am seeing my face change in the mirror. Now in the warm light our bodies are bright against the stone. We lift our faces and sing.

III.

One year ago, due to depressive inability to accomplish simple errands (make an appointment with the gynecologist, drive to the pharmacy) and a longstanding but habitually repressed thought (what would my body be like…?) I stop taking my combination estrogen-progestogen oral contraceptive pills. Suppressed ovulation, thickened cervical mucous, artificial blood. From adolescence, my body has suffered 144 meaningless menses. 

IV.

Just before the south transept, where once in the balcony I sang “In the Bleak Midwinter” beneath the now-fading Te Deum window, I nurse my exhaustion: joints watery, lower belly dully aware of its own emptiness. There is more blood than I’ve come to expect these last months. Twice already I have bled through my undergarments, with nothing to do about it but exhale and proceed. My body insists on becoming part of my vernacular.

V.

Years ago: I have a dream I see my daughter, not yet made, here in this holy space. Her white dress grazes her knees as she tips her own wooden chair against the stone piers, marveling at the light diffusing through the great Rose Window. Her eyes wander like incense.

VI. 

My body changes, it seems, almost immediately. In the absence of cycle-defying hormones, my thighs and hips shrink, the ribs that splay from my sternum announce themselves, my face makes itself a shade slimmer. I think of the adolescent months following that first prescription, clear-skinned at last but still fraught: my brother ridiculing the slight paunch spilling over my after-school-sports uniform, my mother intimating to me how much like a dancer I used to look. Everybody makes a claim. I never thought of my body so much, until it wasn’t mine. 

VII.

Once, I nestled in these choir pews and raised my voice. Above me, faces emerge from the stone and every corner holds a figure. Dim sunlight from the clerestory throws a clot of color into the nave. It melts across the limestone walls as the sun sinks. Everywhere I look I have already looked; everywhere I stand I have already stood. Something has been taken from me. 

VIII.

Ovulation suppression, I learn, can outlast the final dose of hormones by months. I am indignant when I realize this. Already I have been revisited by the ghost of adolescent acne that set me on the pill in the first place, and now I can’t even menstruate like an adult.

IX.

I start my period the summer I turn twelve, and immediately I am initiated into the strictures of womanhood. Keep your products close-at-hand but concealed. Don’t make it into a thing. Check your bathing suit for tampon strings. Roll used pads in toilet paper to hide in the trash. Soak stained underwear or sheets immediately, and use cold water because hot water sets blood. Don’t wear white. Carry spares with you to avoid embarrassment. Don’t be embarrassed. 

X.

A doctor tells me that I don’t want what I want. I have questions—she tells me, “no, you don’t.” Some of my friends—she tells me, “uterine perforation” and “contraindicated for nulliparous females.” Well, according to my research—she tells me, “yes, there was a time in my life when I also didn’t care about my body.” I haven’t had my period in nine weeks. I don’t want to return to hormones; I want to try a copper IUD. No, I don’t need her to administer a pregnancy test. Because I’m not pregnant. Because I know I’m not. Because I’m learning my body, I am paying attention, I am listening, and I know. Better than her, I know. For the first time, I know, I know.

XI.

Longing makes its own syntax, builds its own cities around a wellspring of loss. I partition it off, erect temples to trauma and possibility. The buttresses and piers cascade like bundles of wire, cables of stone packed for structural integrity, striations of mortar plummeting to the marble floor. 

XII. 

Fridays, I stand in a white chapel dress and immerse myself in ecclesiastical nostalgia. I am aware that I am on the cusp of becoming. I hardly know what to do with my chest, my stomach, that unappeasable yearning to be filled with things that have never happened. No one could be ugly here. I want to melt into the windows, agitate myself apart until nothing but color remains. 

XIII.

The first time I have my period as an adult is a revelation. Here is real blood, more real than the withdrawal-induced bleeding that followed each 21-day regimen of medication. More real, even, than the taste of iron in my throat when a cough blows through my body, or the crimson line beading up on my skin when a nail catches my arm—a native response to the dips and rises of this geography, absent intervention or invasion. I am relieved my body knows how to do something without my having to plead.  

XIV.

The stone is singing now in wind that whips between the towers and the buttresses. It fades in and out behind the chatter of the choir boys. The Cathedral is vibrating, threatening to break open into song, intoning like water through a dam, a gorge, insistent and low, full of deep color and eddying around my consciousness, or I around it.

XV.

Unmedicated, I feel everything: the man with the cap and stubble in the checkout line, the couple holding each other on the sidewalk, the waitress touching my fingers as she hands me my card. Two months since my cycle returned and I am still dazed by the flux of desire and loss. I stare at myself in the mirror. I touch my skin. I am startled by my own incandescence. 

XVI.

At this hour, the mottled color staining the limestone and marble nave looks as though it might have emanated not from the windows, but from the stone itself. As though light could live inside stone. As though in its struggle to emerge, it might have shattered into brilliance.