Vitality

Occasionally I feel alive

I recall the first time I was punched hard enough and in the right place for my nose to bleed. Or, not the actual fight, but just after. Slouched over the sink of a public bathroom.

I was enamored with the image in the mirror. It was me, hair mussed, red streaked down my shirt, cupping a coagulating puddle in my hand, watching the blood run slowly out my nose and gather in my philtrum and spill silky over my lips and down my chin. When I bared my teeth I saw a pink grimace and tasted the salt and iron all over my tongue. 

I let the jellied blob in my hand fall into the sink and it jiggled among the splatters dribbling off my jaw. They slid down into the drain, streaking long red tails behind them. I stared at them, and back at me. Enthralled. I couldn’t bring myself to wash any of it away. I felt the blood on my lips begin to gel and crust over and the drip from my nose slowed and stopped. 

Something about that image made my heart race. I stood there for ages and when I finally left the blood had stuck to the sink and the water wouldn’t wash it down. I took a picture of the stains on my shirt to keep it forever. 

What was it about it? What brought me to lust for my own blood? 

That wasn’t the last time it happened, but each time it did I learned to become embarrassed of that outward weakness and protect myself. I didn’t feel it anymore. I sought it elsewhere where it came. I developed a habit of standing outside in lightning storms, letting my shoes fill with water, looking for funnels overhead, hoping to see a strike obliterate a tree in my eyeline. I ran outside in the dead of night in every weather and scraped my skin off sliding on slick midnight ice. I relished every throb of heartache, turning it over and over in my head and licking off every last bit of feeling I could squeeze from it. 

Really, what is it? It seems pretty obvious now.

I once told someone I’d rather have something bad happen to me than nothing at all. I’m not sure why I said it, but I know why I felt it.

I’m an alien, a distant observer to a world that has very little to do with me, watching lives go by. But sometimes I get struck with that divine adrenaline, a connection to vitality, life itself, enough to make me human for a moment. It’s in my genes to seek it, in my blood to need it. 

For a while I feared it, wondered where it would end, if it would at all. But a certain apathy made itself known, and there’s peace in not knowing. There’s no apprehension anymore, only the terminal desire to feel alive.