I was on my second set of lateral pull-ups when I heard an idiot say to another idiot: “I was having intercourse with my girlfriend when she started her period. I dumped that tramp immediately.”

Dear nameless dude at the gym, you are the reason my girl friends cried funeral tears the first time blood arrived. The sudden grief all young daughters of Eve feel upon enlisting into adulthood—the induction into a reality they did not wish to participate in nor were able to negotiate—has everything to do with people like you and your condescension toward what a woman’s body can do.

Herein begins a biology lesson for you, since you seem to have slept through it in fourth grade: there’s this thing called a uterus; it sheds itself every 28 days or so. Just as our bodies train us, women learn how to let things go—how to let dying flesh leave the body, how to renew, how to regenerate. Women know how to wax and wane, not unlike the moon and the tides, both of which influence how YOU, too, behave.

When your mother carried you, the ocean in her belly made you buoyant, made you possible. When you broke through her skin—wet and panting from the heat of her body, the very body whose machinery you now mock with your Pinoy machismo—you had that same fluid you are so repulsed by under your tongue. That body you mindlessly degenerate wrapped you in everything that was miraculous about, and sang you lullabies laced in platelets—without which you wouldn’t have a pack of alpha incels to mock your girlfriend with.

See, it’s possible that we know the world better because of the blood that visits so many of us. It barges out of our favorite skirts uninvited and shows up at brunch dates unannounced. Blood does that. Blood is the loudest siren we can never hear coming, so we understand that blood misbehaves. It does not wait for a go signal or a “welcome” sign above the door. It does not halt at the sight of pink tax or the lack of unbroken napkin dispensers in poor WASH facilities. Blood does not decelerate when the pigs posing as public officials control women’s bodies like properties to be distributed to men. See, now it’s a civics lesson. 

When you deal with blood over and over again, it makes you a warrior. And while all great generals know not to disclose battle strategies to the enemy, let me say this to you, idiot at the gym: if there’s any sort of karmic balance in the universe at all, you are going to be blessed with daughters. Blessed. In Old English, “bless” originally meant “to consecrate with blood.” See how I’m giving you lessons in linguistics now? Because blood speaks. 

Your daughters will teach you what all men must one day come to know: that women, made of moonbeam magic and lunar carnage, will speak to you in blood.

You will have to learn its syllabic tones or else, when we get it all over the sheets and car seats, you will be unprepared. We’re going to introduce you to our insides, and if you do not learn to speak in ichor tongues, it will spread across your world and leave an incessant stain.

So to my future daughter, should any fool mishandle that wild geography of your body—how it rides a crimson current like any great fighter or powerful witch would—well then, just bleed, my love. Give that blood a biblical name—something of brick and mortar. Name it after Sappho’s first lyric in Lesbos. Name it after the last little girl to have her genitals mutilated in Somalia (that was this morning). Name it as many syllables as there are unreported rape cases.

Give the blood a name that sounds like the end of the world—something mighty, something holy, something unfathomable, or something spoken in angelic tongues. Name it for the battle you wage between your legs and for the women who will not remain nameless here. 

Spill your unruly scripture all over the good furniture, and just bleed anyway. Bleed and bleed and bleed on everything he loves. Period.

Art slider by Renee Macalalad