A Period Piece

Being a True & Faithful Chronicle of the Lady’s Departure from the Hot Pink Vial, & Her Subsequent Emergence as a Person

* Here the Lady doth set down her quill and regard the manuscript with a furrowed brow. It hath come to her attention that certain words contained within this chronicle were not, strictly speaking, available at the time of its composition. She is aware of this. The Lady hath considered their removal and found the alternatives wanting, and she asketh only that the reader extend to her the same mercy they would extend to any woman doing her best under difficult circumstances, which these, as the evidence do jointly attest, were.

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PART THE FIRST: OF THE PHYSICK & ITS ADMINISTRATION

In the year of her sixteenth summer, the Lady was prescribed the Physick. Of the reasons thereunto pertaining, she shall not speak. Her parents yet live, and before them she maintains the position – held firm as any fortified tower – that she emerged fully formed from a chrysalis, having never possessed occasion to require such remedies. What she will chronicle is this: the Physick was dispensed with cheerfulness, with haste, and with the untroubled confidence of a medical establishment that hath been conducting this particular business since the nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-first year of Our Lord, and hath no particular quarrel with it.

For the first weeks of her administration thereof, the Lady was, by all credible accounts, a grumpy wretch. She was sixteen varieties of wretched and cast blame upon all things save the glaring Hot Pink Vial of synthetic hormones she consumed each morning with her water. Blame fell upon her schooling, upon her examinations, upon the weather, upon the boys, upon the evening’s supper (for which the Lady doth here beg her mother’s continued pardon), and upon sundry other trifles of no consequence.

She did not, the Lady wisheth to note, blame the Physick. This was not because she was stupid. This was because she was sixteen, and being sixteen is a condition that produces, among other things, an absolute certainty that one’s suffering is unique, legitimate, and caused by everything in the external world rather than anything in the internal one. The Lady remembers being sixteen with the particular tenderness one reserves for a person who was doing their best and had no idea what was happening.

And then – as plagues and marriages and all manner of inconvenient things do – these feelings dissolved somewhat. The Lady formed the grievous misapprehension that she had grown older, cooler*, and past all difficulty. She filed the matter in the great archive of Things Best Not Examined and proceeded thence to concerns of greater apparent import, by which means, she got on with it.

Let it be recorded for posterity: they had not dissolved. She had merely forgotten, which is a different matter entirely, and one the Lady doth now recognise as the Physick’s most accomplished trick.

PART THE SECOND: WHEREIN THE LADY IS FINE, & POSTAL ROUTES ARE MUCH ABUSED

The thing about the Physick is that it doth not announce itself. There is no dramatic affliction, no fit of the vapours, no occasion upon which the Lady might reasonably have declared herself unwell and taken herself to bed. She was not afflicted with melancholy. She was not afflicted with wrongness. She was afflicted with fineness. A mild and horizontal fineness, spread evenly across her days like a thin gruel that doth technically constitute a meal. Everything was fine, she was fine. And therein lay the difficulty, for fine is a very hard thing to argue with, and a very easy thing to simply continue being.

The Lady wisheth the reader to understand what fine looked like in practice, as she findeth the word insufficient to the task. Fine looked like this: she would think of a thing she wished to do, and would then think about thinking about doing it, and would then make a cup of tea, and then it would be evening. Fine looked like ordering a book and leaving it in its parcel for three weeks because opening it required a decision about where to put it, and decisions about where to put things required a kind of energy that was simply not available. Fine looked like being, by most external measures, a perfectly functional young woman, and by no internal measure whatsoever actually present at them. Fine was, it doth now appear, not fine. But it was very convincingly fine, and the Lady had been performing it for so long that she had, at some point, forgotten it was not.

Meanwhile, the chronicle continued. The Lady removed herself to the city of Glasgow for the purposes of University. Glasgow, a city of great repute and questionable mercy toward its newcomers, did operate upon a model of medical provision that the Lady can only describe as providence (or at least thus it appeared to one small country-bumpkin Lady arriving within its gates) by which she meaneth: thou art on thy own, good luck, God wileth it. She required a physician. She did not acquire a physician. She meant to acquire a physician on several separate occasions spanning multiple years, and each time a matter of greater urgency presented itself, by which the Lady meaneth: nothing presented itself. She simply could not do it.

She instead did what any subject in a not-a-crisis-at-all crisis doth do, and dispatched a messenger to her mother.

Her mother (a saint; may her name be remembered in the annals and her seat in heaven be both comfortable and well-positioned) did collect the prescriptions from the physician of the Lady’s hometown and forwarded them to Glasgow by royal post. Every several months, like the turning of the seasons, like the reliable rising of the sun, like any of the things on can count upon absolutely and thus takes for granted, three months’ worth of Hot Pink Hormones would arrive, dispatched with love across the realm.

When the Lady then removed herself to the Italian territories, the operation did escalate to that of a minor diplomatic mission. There were several expeditions wherein members of the family’s retinue did traverse the continent by air, conveying amongst their hand luggage – alongside their shirts and their sweetmeats and their sundry personal effects – the Lady’s contraceptive supply. They moved as small and loving smugglers, united in their refusal to engage with the Italian system of medicine, which the Lady hath heard is perfectly adequate but which none of them were prepared to find out.

PART THE THIRD: OF THE COUNSEL THE LADY DID RECEIVE & REJECT

Throughout all of this, courtiers did occasionally speak unto the Lady. They spoke with good intention, as courtiers do when they wish to be of service. They spake thus: thou knowest, the Physick can affect most grievously thy hormones. They spake: I did depart from mine own Physick and felt an entirely different creature. One particularly well-meaning medical courtier did present the Lady with a pamphlet* on the subject, which the Lady received with a smile and filed in the previously mentioned great archive of Things Best Not Examined, alongside the matter of the Physick itself and a letter from her bank that she hath been meaning to open since the previous November. The Lady’s archive is, at this point, quite full.

They further spake (and here they would lower their voices, in the manner of one delivering news the listener hath clearly not the constitution to receive): hast thou considered that it might be

affecting thee?

The Lady heard these counsels. She considered them briefly, as one considers a stone in the road before stepping around it, and she did step around them with enormous confidence. She was not affected. She was simply a weary soul – one who required a considerable distance of road before executing rather modest decisions, in whom the passage between the wanting and the doing was wide and largely impassable, as though the two were separated by a river with no bridge and an indolent ferryman having his lunch. This was her character. She had possessed this character for years. She had, in point of fact, possessed it since approximately her sixteenth year, which she did not find suspicious, for one does not find suspicious that which one has never known otherwise.

As if she should be so easily altered by something as trivial as her own natural hormones. Her real ones, no less.

Thy spells shall not prevail upon me, natural hormones. I am quite contented in my low-wattage* existence.

In the midst of this quarrel, she was, crucially, still not in possession of a physician.

PART THE FOURTH: THE VIAL RUNNETH OUT

Two months past, the supply was exhausted. The Hot Pink Vial stood empty upon the shelf, as a throne from which the sovereign hath lately fled, and the Lady regarded it with the expression of one who hath known this day would come and hath done absolutely nothing to prevent it.

Let it be recorded, for the sake of honest chronicle, that there was no great period of deliberation that did precede this. The Lady doth not arrive at circumstances so much as discover herself already within them, having travelled there by a route she cannot fully account for, through a sequence of events that were, as even the Lady’s most loyal counsel would be forced to concede, her fault – and Glasgow’s. Glasgow, for reasons of its own sovereign choosing, continued in its long-established custom of not furnishing the lady with a physician, and so she did think: thou knowest what, I shall not be troubled with this. And thus it was. The Lady resteth easy in her conscience, which is the main thing.

Now. For those who desire the dry account – the physician’s account, the account one might read in a learned treatise whilst sitting in a very uncomfortable chair with insufficient natural light, eating a biscuit one did not particularly want – here is what the Physick doth: it introduceth into the body quantities of artificial oestrogen and progestogen sufficient to persuade the pituitary gland, that small and credulous governor of the body’s interior kingdom, that the Lady is already with child (heaven forfend!). The pituitary gland, being easily deceived and apparently not very bright, doth believe this entirely, and doth on that basis suppress all further ovulation. The natural cycle – the one that produceth the Lady’s own true hormones, the ones her body hath been labouring to produce since the onset of her womanhood, the ones that are, when one thinks about it, rather hers – goeth quiet.

She doth not notice its silence, for she is sixteen and possesseth no point of comparison. The silence is simply the baseline. The baseline is simply the self. And so it goeth, for a number of years that the Lady hath counted and found to be more than she is entirely comfortable with, but which she is choosing to regard as formative rather than lost, on the grounds that this is the more useful framing and she is trying to be sensible about it.

And then one day the Physick ceaseth, and the Lady is presented to herself, and hath absolutely no idea what to do with her, for she hath never been introduced.

PART THE FIFTH: THE EMERGENCE OF THE LADY’S INTERESTS & OTHER ALARMING DEVELOPMENTS

The Lady wisheth to set down what followed without becoming insufferable. There is a version of this chronicle wherein she employeth the word ‘awakening’ without the protective armour of quotation marks, and the reader doth close the manuscript, and cast it into the fire, and call for wine, and summon a priest, and they would be right to do so. She is endeavouring not to write that chronicle. What she is instead writing is that in the ceasing of the Hot Pink Vial – as when a siege is lifted and the gates of a city do creak slowly open and the inhabitants emerge blinking into the light unsure of whether to weep or not – the Lady appears to have developed interests.

For instance: this very document. The Lady hath established a Substack*. Let the heralds be summoned! Let this be read aloud at the next available assembly, and thereafter embroidered upon something! She hath never in her life undertaken anything so exhilaratingly extracurricular*. She is one who hath historically found the concept of a Project to be vaguely exhausting – the domain of other, more ambitious, domain-named persons. And yet here she standeth, with a Substack*, which she did establish and name and fill with words, entirely of her own volition, without mandate, without anyone asking her to do it even once, which she findeth most extraordinary, though others may not, but that is their matter and not hers.

She hath begun attending a café* each morning. She hath a specific café*, which she located on her third day of the new regime by the method of walking until she found somewhere that did not make her immediately wish to leave. Within that café*, she hath a specific chair, which she hath assessed, occupied, and claimed by right of consistent presence, in the manner of a small and low-stakes act of territorial expansion – this café* being located a mere twenty seconds’ march from her front gate, which the Lady acknowledgeth somewhat undermined the territorial drama. Within her café* there resides a gentleman who doth always precede her in arrival and doth play games upon the establishment’s computing* devices, and she findeth his presence deeply comforting, like a lighthouse, like a sentinel who hath never acknowledged her existence and is therefore perfect.

In a related development, the Lady hath granted herself dispensation to cease attending the library. This was not a decision made lightly. The Lady hath a deep and genuine respect for libraries as institutions, for the idea of libraries, for the democratic and civilising function of the library in the life of a society. She doth not have a deep and genuine respect for this particular library. It doth make her grumpy and hungry. It is grey and crowded and smelleth, the Lady shall be direct, of BO*. The café* doth not. It is yellow and quiet and smelleth of freshly baked pastries, and its privy is clean and consistently unoccupied. The computing* device is the same computing* device. The studying is the same studying. The Lady hath done the mathematics and, quite frankly, the library is hereby served notice of her departure. She wisheth it well.

She did purchase jeans*. The Lady appreciates this may sound as nothing, but it is, in truth, of the utmost significance and she will not have it minimised. She had, until this point, worn exclusively linens, for linens will fit any person who owneth a belt, and thus she was not required to enter a shop and be approached by a slimmer version of herself and declare that no, she required no assistance, and begin to perspire, and depart with nothing. However, since the Hot Pink Vial ceased its governance of her person, she did find the jeans*, and command them by post, and receive them, and regard herself in the looking glass, and perceive therein Aphrodite, and the matter was closed. She is now the proud possessor of three pairs.

The Lady findeth this extraordinary. The Lady doth not require others to find it extraordinary. The Lady hath, as previously noted, a Substack*, and hath recorded it thereupon.

She did rearrange her chamber. She resolved the night before to dedicate the entire following day to this endeavour, and was excited about it in advance, which is itself an earth-shattering miracle sufficient to warrant its own entry in this chronicle. Excitement about a planned domestic activity, experienced in advance of the activity, had not previously been a feature of the Lady’s interior life. She moved her bed. She moved her writing desk from the window and replaced it with a speaking device* upon which a rubber duck doth sit (a jaunty note of colour). She did wander to the market-square and there, among the clamour of baristas* and the rattling of granny trolleys* upon the stones, did purchase many a fair vinyl disc of sundry musicks and diverse humours. These round relics she bore homeward like trophies and, returning to her chamber, did set about their placing with deliberate ceremony, each disc becoming a small but bright moon orbiting the quiet kingdom of her room. She stood back and surveyed the result and felt something she can only describe as a deep tenderness for this new chamber she had been withholding from herself for the past year, like a miser who hath sat upon a treasure chest so long he hath forgotten it openeth. And standing there, she did radiate the confidence of one who created light upon the first day.

PART THE SIXTH: A RECKONING

It is not that she hath become productive in some aspirational sense. She is not establishing a trading concern, nor learning the Portuguese tongue, nor training for any endeavour possessing a finish line, nor doing any of the various things that ambitious persons do when they with it to be known that they are ambitious persons. It is something, in the Lady’s estimation, more remarkable than that: it is that things occur to her now, and she goeth and doth them, and this seemeth entirely ordinary, and it is not.

It was not, before. Before, the Lady would have the reader understand that there was a fog between the thought and the deed, a thick yet transparent fog, one she could not perceive but could most certainly feel. The thought would arrive, and the Lady would receive it, and then she would stand at the edge of the doing of it, and the doing would recede, and she would conclude that this was simply her nature, and return to her bed, and the thought would sit in the corner of the room, quietly, for several weeks, until she either forgot it entirely or did it at eleven o’clock on a Sunday in a sudden burst of energy that she could not account for and certainly could not replicate.

It doth turn out it was her. That is to say: it was not her nature. It was the Physick, installed upon her nature like an uninvited houseguest who hath occupied the good chair for so long that the household hath begun to set a place for him at supper. He did not deserve the place at supper. He did not deserve the good chair.

For the Physick is a courteous oppressor. It doth not announce itself, nor arrive with banners and proclamations and the clatter of a siege. It settleth, quietly, upon the nervous system like a very polite, very insidious weight, and one doth adapt, as one adapteth to most things that do not immediately kill one. One doth cease to notice. One doth conclude that this is simply who one is. One who commandeth parcels and then doth not open them for a fortnight. One who forgetteth what day it is because nothing, according to her, hath occurred that week, though the week hath in fact been full of occurrences to which she was simply not paying her full attendance.

And then it ceaseth, and the weight lifteth, and one is left standing in a rearranged chamber, in new jeans*, with a Substack*, and a rubber duck* on a speaking device*, blinking.

It doth not feel like a return to some earlier, truer self from whom the Lady hath been long separated, some innocent maiden, pure of heart and unacquainted with examinations and possessed of a strange fondness for the rap music*. That creature is gone and the Lady doth not mourn her, for she cannot recall her with sufficient accuracy to miss her properly. Instead, the Lady doth liken it to the lifting of a siege one had ceased to notice was ongoing. Like a candle that hath burned dim for so long that one adjusted to the dimness and forgot that dimness was not the natural state of candles – and then someone lit another, and one sitteth there, slightly overwhelmed, thinking:

Good lord. Hath the realm always been this vivid, and did no one think to mention it?

One cannot mourn an appetite so consistently managed that one hath ceased to expect it. One cannot grieve a self one hath never been introduced to, any more than one might mourn a banquet one did not know was being held, in a hall one did not know existed, to which one was not invited, because one was sitting in an adjacent room assuming that adjacent rooms were all there was, and that the sound coming through the wall was simply how walls sounded, and that the smell of cooking was simply how the air smelled, and that this was fine, one was perfectly content in one’s adjacent room. One doth simply conclude, after sufficient years, that this is what it is to be a lady of mature station going about her affairs.

And she cannot be wrathful about it. This is, the Lady confesseth, its own particular vexation – for she would very much like to be wrathful, as wrath is a cleaner and more satisfying emotion than the one she is left with, which hath no proper name. She cannot be wrathful at a choice she made, and would in different circumstances likely make again. She cannot be wrathful at the years, for they were still her years and she was still within them, more or less, doing her best with the candle she had been given. She noticed, in the end, the way one doth notice when a sound one hath long ceased to hear hath finally and completely stopped. Not the sound itself. The absence of it.

EPILOGUE: THUS ENDETH THE CHRONICLE

The Lady feeleth interested in things. Not in the abstract and aspirational sense, but in specific things, particular things. She feeleth the want before the obstacle. She walketh through the city and noticeth it. The light on the buildings in the morning, the way the queue in the café* moves, the expression on the face of the gentleman at the computing* device when he wins (which hath happened twice in the Lady’s presence and which she hath found, both times, disproportionately pleasing).

She hath a Substack*. She doth her morning stretches*. She hath begun, on occasion, to read ahead. She hath three new pairs of jeans*, hanging in a tidy wardrobe in a chamber she did arrange herself, on a day she had been looking forward to, which she intendeth to continue finding remarkable for as long as it pleaseth her to do so.

She is not taking questions –

(She is, however, taking breakfast. On purpose, every morning, because it turneth out she enjoyeth it. Let it be known that the Lady hath, at long last, come into her appetite. And if the court hath opinions on the matter, the Lady directeth them to the kitchen, where they may take cake, and eat it, and reflect upon their priorities.)

– But she is, it doth turn out, available.

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Appendix: A Non-Exhaustive Register of New Simple Pleasures Taken Up by the Lady, Presented Herewith for the Record

• Hillwalking in the realm’s finer territories

• The compilation of a Bucket List* (a document of aspirations; not an actual bucket)

• Great and sudden excitement regarding recipes

• The procurement of three turtlenecks*

• The establishment of a Substack* (see main chronicle, passim)

• The rearrangement of her musicks and the first activation of her speaking device* in several years

• A marked increase in the dispatching of correspondence; or is it the receiving thereof?

• The cooking of meals requiring more than one vessel

• Research into available positions of gainful employment

• The initiation of a stretching regimen each morning

• The consumption of new entertainments rather than the repeated consumption of old ones

• The drafting of a list of lists

• The acquisition of a granny trolley*

• The lighting of incense*, or the awakening to the existence of smells

• The purposeful eating of the morning meal

• Attendance at University lectures in which she is one of only two persons present

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