I curse thee algorithm and our phones listening to us.

The last ad I saw was: “Your vagina is a superhero.” All because I’m admittedly both curious and interested in learning about perimenopause. I can’t help myself. I know what my hormones do to me thanks to PMDD; I’m not about to finally experience relief from that hell only to enter my forties fighting blind.

My friend and I are at a tailoring and alterations shop, freely talking about our menstrual lives and our uncertainties and all the things in-between.

The view from where I stand, elevated, having fabric obnoxiously pinned up thanks to my height, is my tailor’s glossy black curls, her breasts (sorry! they were OUT), and her knees, almost-kid-like over her black boots. I keep staring at her necklace instead of her boobs, trying to make out the symbol: is it a zodiac sign? A patron saint of… sewing? But my friend grabs my attention.

“Anyway, I’m feeling crazy. I’ve been crazy and I don’t even know why. I just feel like everything is out of my control and I want to host a girls’ night again but I can’t even come up with the time.”

I commiserate with her on this, then offer up my own uneasiness.

“The other night I went for a run, came home, took a shower, laid on the couch, and immediately started shivering,” I say. “Just shaking with… dread? Body aches? Was I getting the flu? Was I dying?”

None of these lines are particularly funny, but I deliver them theatrically, and both my friend and the tailor laugh. I immediately soften inside the cocoon of women who understand one another.

The space we’re in is cozy. Surrounded by antiques and clocks. A cuckoo clock that feels like it could startle at any moment, a dusty mantlepiece clock, a Grandfather Clock that doesn’t work anymore but is majestic as hell. Someone painted the ceiling slats with ivy. The walls are a soft pink, patterned with champagne-colored flowers. There’s a dark brown bureau with handwritten poetry in an intricate, brushed gold box, and I keep trying to make the cursive out; it’s faint, but I can see one line: “Poetry starts with a lump in your throat.”

The night I mentioned? I shook myself out of my uneasiness by medicating and watching an Alicia Silverstone Christmas movie on Netflix. I ask the girls, “Did you see it? I kinda loved it. I know it’s bad, but I felt like it was self-aware bad. It didn’t really make me calm down, though.”

“Girl, it sounds like were having an anxiety attack,” the tailor says, without blinking.

“Was that what that was?!” I laugh and stare at myself in the mirror. “Huh.”

“You needed sour candy,” she says.

“REALLY!?” I’m all ears. “Tell me more, tell me why.”

She looks up at me, and I see how lovely her freckles are, sprinkled from her nose to the apples of her cheeks. “Distraction,” she shrugs. “I’ve got a bag of Warheads in here somewhere. The taste is so intense, you forget you’re suffering.”

When my friend and I walk to her car after we’re all paid up, we continue our conversation. Mostly: what’s next in your day, are you feeling any better, what kind of coffee did you get at the shop you were just at? Do you think she was full of shit about the sour candy?

We go deeper, as close friends do. She admits to feeling listless lately. I tell her something I think about often, I know I’m offering unsolicited advice, but it’s something Brandy (therapist) once said to me:

“Your life isn’t boring, your screen time just might be too high.
You’re not ugly, your screen time is just might be too high.
Your kitchen isn’t hideous, your screen time just might be too high.”

When I watch her face visibly relax, she laughs and says, “Well, damnit, how do we stop?”

In this quick little errand in my day, with me and my friend’s superhero vagina (is this vulgar? I have to connect it) I realize the real fix isn’t (just) sour candy or bad Christmas movies.

It’s women raising each other’s vibrations, through all our life stages. However lame that sounds, it just is.