WRITING: blood

This was written March 5th, 2004. At this time, blood definitely was a theme in my life. But the concept still resonates today. I believe this was written as therapy homework considering I was dreaming about blood constantly.

Dream interpretation says that blood represents the life force. I don’t believe it. Even as it pounds through my veins, my own blood haunts me. It does not sustain me; it infects me. Sometime, someway it was poisoned and has now become some perverse element in my life. I see it in the passing of my dead child, in learning the best method to distract myself from pain, in the hallucinations of my disease, and in my twisted dreams.

There was so much blood, a deep crimson that I had never seen before. The shades of red danced together as they poured from me and slipped down the toilet. The wrenching pains were the dying cries of my baby. I felt it clawing from inside me – nothing would want to grow in a body as wretched as mine. The bleeding never slowed; it never seemed to end. It tainted my sheets at night. I saw the vague, dead soul in it every time it disappeared in the swirling water.

Cutting was a completely different thing. I finally realized that burning was not enough to quench my pain – it did not let the blood escape. I could hear the blood scream and sigh in relief as I sliced the blade along my arm and allowed it to trickle over my skin. As the tranquility tingled over me, I watched it flow. The bright red drops spattering in the white sink. Then I bound it back in beneath the bandage.

Reality was not its only arena though. What the blood could not taint or infect in real life, it ravaged in my mind. My hallucinations could supposedly be linked to my bipolar disorder, but there was always blood, always pain. My first hallucination – the image consumed my sight – my own arms were held in front of me, slashed and bleeding. It dripped down from my wrists off my elbows. The rest mirrored the first, my carved flesh – wrists, arms, legs, back, stomach. Then the walls began to bleed. The thick liquid oozed from the ceiling as I showered or brushed my hair. Blood everywhere, always before my eyes, always in my mind.

As it pumped through my brain itself, the blood also snaked through my dreams. Reality, conscious delusions, even figments of my unconscious – all drenched with blood, my blood. In one dream, my entire body burned as I stood in a bathroom. The pain felt as if my flesh was being ripped from the bones. I looked down to see every burn I had inflicted on myself decay down to an open wound, every cut I had slashed split open and pour out blood. It gushed out of me. I climbed into the bathtub and let it fill with my blood. In another, barbed wire was wrapped around my wrists. My flesh tore and ripped away as the barbed wire was tugged off. These and endless other flashings of blood, mutilation, cuts.

Blood is all I see. The images are branded on the backs of my eyelids, on the walls of my mind. I should be a vampire for such an infatuation. Why does it infect every facet of my experience? Is it guilt from a dead child? Is it my preoccupation with self-mutilation? Is it the symptoms of a morbid, disturbed mind? What makes the walls bleed and scars split open?