As the moon talked to the woman

They say one best plant the flower at new moon. They say blood runs best at full moon. The cycle of the moon, present in nature, in soil, in the liquid rushing through the Maguey, in the streams running through us women. If it’s the moon my cycle blindly follows, then I’m a woman of the moon. 

Some days I wake up, the moon just drowned behind the roller blinds, its faint shadow still perpetuating the shy day, and my awakening is accompanied by a deep sensual longing. A longing only familiar to the moon when desiring the sun. My sun… and I rise, my gaze casting glances after my forgotten dream. The moment of epiphany; my ovulation started. With it, the preparation of the body and thoughts in anticipation of unsatisfied desire, tension, some faint smiles. Of my longing fingers grasping the sun, and eventually caressing the beaming light within my palms.  

The week passes, the moon grows, and during some nights desire elapses, replaced by a different kind of tension: hunger. Hunger not after him, sun’s physical presence and loving affection. No, I’m filled with a craving only stilled by tripled chocolate brownies. 

No one wants to cross me on my volatile hunt, only the silver light gifted to follow my moods without injury. And like waves they overwhelm me, the sadness, the feeling of loss, abandonment, and the fury that none except the moon understand. I can’t explain why I harbor those feelings, helpless, reasonless I am…Unable to understand why I am the one surrendered to this ruling of the tide, just because I’m a woman? 

My anticipating gaze directed to the sky till the day it should fill its half and I would be released from these feelings I can’t change, can’t control.

And when I wake up, the glittering stars still unfold over the night sky. Dawn has not yet overruled the moon, but my legs are covered by the liquid, moist and warm as running tears. The scent of magnesium wetting my sheets and viscid my body aches. She murmurs the assurance I’m hurt, though We survived the waves’ crash. My mother says a woman’s body is the cleanest of them all, bleeding the world’s poison, flushing patriarchy out of our bodies. So she says, and maybe I’ll be, after a week of pain and isolation, different. A clear mind, as if the blood washed the pain away, flushed out all those worries of how to behave, how to appear, in a productivity obsessed and gendered society. Instead, petrichor infuses the air. I’ve grown, once more, the feeling of frailty, feebleness shrug off. But my will, my power, my love and enthusiasm are sweeping over the border of my mind into the world. Then, once more the cycle will start anew, and my emotion, tied to it. 
She says strength lies within it. 

And isn’t she right?, the moon whispers. 
Even though I can’t control my emotions, even though the pain and aches are shivering through me over and over again, shouldn’t there be power in a cycle illuminated by the moon? We live through the deepest lust and greatest loneliness, we observe the course of our bodies and her needs with carefulness as to understand what our bodies, what We long for. Shouldn’t this inspire a bond between us and womanhood as deep as the feelings the cycle of the moon awakens? A sense of the power womanhood inherently bears as we live through this cycle month after month. Power simply because we are women, entities capable of living, giving life, creating community. Tracing women’s path over the course of time holding together family, raising, educating the future, they, the warm centre of consolation and advice. Women’s depths were neglected for centuries and still women wear womanhood with strength in an astonishing manner, as astonishing as women’s capability to feel.

They say during menstruation a woman blossoms in creativity. May we use this infusion to look up to womanhood as we look up to the moon and praise the strength that comes with this loss of control. 

Words by Ramona Schnall, a 21 years-old writer who grew up in a town in the south of Germany where she discovered her passion for words and their infinite implications. Currently based in The Hague, she studies International Studies with a not-so-much poetic focus. Though she followed her dream and her lasting principle: to write piercingly you have to live.

Photos by Mar Fu Qi (she/her, 1999), a Dutch/Chinese visual artist who studies Photography at Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Through performance, text, film and photography, she creates images that explore the relationship between self identity and social identity with the emphasis on the human body. In 2022, she finished her exchange semester at London College of Communication.