How do you spell that shuddering groan the Simpsons do?

I am now about to share the number-one all time most embarrassing thing that's happened to me in my 38 years and 7 months. The one thing that even now reduces me to whimpers and rending of garments. This is the story that, when I tell it, elicits not raucous laughter but groans of sympathy.

It's not some mispronounced word or inappropriate phrase yelled at a stranger. It's not poorly-timed sickness in front of coworkers. It didn't happen in public, and it's not a funny vignette from my life. No one even witnessed this, it was just us two.

Even still, I don't feel an uncomfortable embarrassment, I feel shame. Shame because of who was involved; a deep shame of a personal nature that should never, ever have involved that other person. It is lasting and it is so sad that I still wince (to this day, even, were inclined to use that phrase, and I am not) when it pops into my head for no reason, like a champagne cork to the head from the table next to you at that expensive tapas place that puts too much mint in their drinks.

It is this:

I was once invited to a birthday swim party in high school. I was on my period, and I had never used a tampon before. The only woman around to assist me in understanding the mechanics of tampons was that woman.

Let that sink in. Roll it around your head like you're tasting it at a fancy wine bar: let the tastebuds of your mind pop as that bitter slab of my dignity withers and dies. Just try to pry the kernels of popcorn sticking painfully between your tooth and gum when you realize you know how that must have made her feel: pride that I "trusted" her to ask such an intimate question, the rush I'm sure she felt when she realized that she knew something that I did not.

Ok, that's maybe too much metaphor. Sorry. I'm trying to heal with words and sometimes tortured prose is the only way to make it work. I turn real emotions into imagined things that I can crush and stomp and hit and hopefully try to get out of my head.

But then I remember the story she once told of one of her husband's stays in the hospital. I have a lot of history with that lady that is painful to think about, but at least I wasn't married to her and I didn't nearly die having been kicked in the balls by a homeless guy.