Sopping Up Blood

Dear Nadja,

Yes, I know Chinatown very well. Did you know that Chinese women don't wear tampons? I discovered this when I went to New York to cover Jospeaux’s band. I was staying in Chinatown and walked the whole neighborhood looking for a drugstore and asking around until finally a white girl told me what the deal was. No luck.

I never used pads, did you? I got my first period during swimming lessons and if I love any exercise it's swimming so I forced myself to use tampons from the beginning. I can't stand how expensive they are and that men don't have to pay for these things. How much money in our lifetimes goes to sopping up blood? I read once about hippie girls using sea sponges. I couldn't do it because you have to remove it and wash it out in the sink before sticking it back in and I'd be too embarrassed to do that in a public bathroom, which would inevitably be a situation that presented itself.

I guess that would take the kind of self-assuredness I just do not have. Yet.  Hoping as I become older I'll become stronger. Once I had what was called a New York Fucking Attitude but I believe I lost it after all of Jospeaux's infidelity. He’s been forgiven since, and I’ve healed some but I would never had thought it would affect me the way it did and so deeply and for so long.

Have you heard about the artist Ai Weiwei? He is fighting the Communist government in China for the right to make his art. It's a big story. The government destroyed his studio overnight. Just like your busstop, one day it was gone. 

I love you.

Love,
Helena

Chinatown by Bus

Dear Helena,

I was standing at the bus stop, just a stretch of sidewalk where the stop used to be. It was there yesterday. Must’ve been taken away during night. Or this morning. I'm rarely up before afternoon and can't sleep until sunrise.

I am not a happy person, but I often feel happiness. At the sight, for example, of the post-sunset sky, a true royal blue behind the City’s high-rise architecture. It is fleeting. The time and the happiness. I read the Buddhists somehow come to expect and accept, radically, they say, through medication, this strangeness.  

I ride that bus line so often I know which awnings are new in Chinatown. If you know Chinatown, which you do, that ought to be impressive. I like this part of the route. I like to look out the window at the industry. A man dumping live fish into a giant bucket, they were probably caught this morning. I like the pig bodies and chicken bodies hanging in the red heat lamps in the windows. I like all the pink plastic grocery bags. My corner bodega uses black plastic but in Chinatown they’re all pink.

I love you.

Love,
Nadja

Square Three Two One...

This blog is a collection of letters between Nadja and Helena, two girls in San Francisco who are in love with each other and their city.