Blood

The alarm has barely begun before it’s off. Some instinctive half awake fumbling. I’m not really sure I’m awake. I turn to lie on my back, eyes closed. Dreams? Yes there were dreams. A race I was winning before the rules changed, overtaken by minions made of cheeto dust, and when I leapt from my sailboat onto their race car to kill one of them, the rules changed back to normal, and you're not supposed to kill your fellow contestants.

I didn’t leave myself time to write down my dreams. Maybe later. I impress the images into my mind as best I can. There was a lake, Gibbs lake, with docks that went out to the middle and a monster that lurked below as I walked out into deep water. Last night I gave myself an hour before I have to head out. I made scones in  advance so breakfast will just mean baking them.

I’m excited for those scones.

I don’t have to eat the scones at home though. I could eat them on the way. That just means baking them - fifteen minutes - and while they bake I can shave and let the chickens out. In which case maybe half an hour is enough. I turn over and look at my phone. 7:40. 20 minutes to write down dreams. There was an email sent by my old girlfriend Manta, some sort of scandal. I was surprised to find that there was a shadow version of me who reads his emails and knew what was happening. I could write it down before I forget - or I could sleep for another 20 minutes. The dreams aren’t that important I decide.

I roll over, look at my phone, it’s 8:05. Why aren’t I up. It’s the 7th today. 06/07/17. This adds up to 21 - the age at which one can drink. A drinking day then? 7 is the number of life. A living day? I crawl out from under the blankets and scootch towards the ladder down from my bunk bed. A practiced motion over, and . . .

“Oww” I say out loud. I’ve sliced my kneecap top to bottom on the metal handle that I use to pull myself up. I’m awake now. I watch rivulets of blood pilgrimage down my leg, it’s such a beautiful color my blood.

Ahh - I know now - it’s a bleeding day.

---

I have always been jealous of women for their periods. This impulse has to some extent been mocked out of me, as every women I voice this too protests that I don’t know what I’m talking about. There isn’t really a logic to it. Do I want to give a week each month to trying not to bleed on things?

That's not it. I don’t envy the pain, though sometimes I envy pain. It’s the promise, the reminder of the connectedness of things - of the seasons, the moon, the generations coming and going - I want that capacity to be pregnant, that monthly reminder that I am ready.

A bleeding day. I take my lost days in fits and spurts. Days given to the exhaustion of living, days in which the doing stops and the getting done cannot continue - I imagine having time set aside for this self reflection, scheduled into my month by an influx of hormones. I could control the times I cannot control. But it is probably not like that.

And what about the blood? I remember when the vampire came into our house, invited in on a misunderstanding, and stayed until the night kissed four. Homeless crack addict, he wandered our house when we weren’t looking, maybe looking for valuables, and the day after I put every magic I know into keeping our home safe. Blood magic was the last - finger slid along a razor- blood winding around my finger, and into my chalice as offering or invocation.

Is every month a spell cast? A bending of the world to your will - your life bet against the way of the world? There is magic here.

 

What else bleeds but is not injured?

---

I gash my hand on the chicken house door. Not a big gash, but enough to dissuade any doubts as to the nature of the day. My scones sit unbaked in the freezer as I run out the door with last night’s leftovers, forgetting half a dozen things. I show up at Mama’s frazzled and unshaved and unexpected. It’s 9:00.

I work at 10:30. She sends me to go take a shower and clucks over my knee as only a mother can. She offers to drive me so I have time to eat.

 

It is not a bad day then. Work goes smoothly. Twice I chase a deer and her fawn out of the fenced off garden. We find a hole but we aren’t sure it’s the only hole. I have never heard deer make sounds before. These mah at eachother like goats, fawn and mother struggling back and forth on opposite sides of the fence.

 

On the way out my employer asks for my birthday and time and I give it. “Scorpio sun, Aries moon, Libra ascendant,” I add.

“You talk astrology!” she exclaims.  It feels good.

 

A fortunately late bus, flirting with the bank teller, a moment spent with my shadow in the sun and I arrive back at Mama's for lunch. There is an art to it. Always arriving just in time to eat, but never so early as to have to help. My sister is better at it than I, but I practice.

 

As I walk up I see several shirts on hangers by the porch. Men's shirts. My stomach sinks. I've trained her better than this.

---

I am not an easy person to shop for. My aesthetics are too stringent, and I like things a very certain way. No words on my T-shirts. No bright colors. Nothing where I can't roll up the sleeves. I don't like breast pockets or buttons or collars that come up too high. I don't like clothes I can't get dirty. I work with dirt.

 

But Mama has been noticing that all my clothes are dirty all the time and holier than thou besides. She's been trying to talk me into ordering clothes online where I can control everything. I've been working up to it. I don't buy things quickly or impulsively. Clothes coincide with the nature of a day. A new shirt means a new kind of day, and those are dangerous.

---

Now she's gone and bought me some on her own. She has me try on each shirt and come out and show her and my sister, playing with a borrowed baby in the living room. They rate and critique. My sister a little more sincere.

 

I spin around, and then study the baby as Mama goes off into why this shirt looks good on me. Mama is actually batting better than usual. Of eight shirts I actually like two, and two more I might be willing to be caught dead in. I'll still have to slip in something subtle about taking me with her next time though.

 

Then, after a dinner of braised Cod and salad from the garden, I put on a new shirt, one of the ones I'm dubious about, but my sister likes, and I'm off to lead a dance.

---

Days have been echoing differently lately. Not the three part repetition that I'm used to, day beginning small and echoing larger until everything is amplified. This feels more complex, as if the narrative ties together in ways that I could have predicted but isn't just repetition.

 

“Echo" I'll cry in the morning, expecting the ‘echo echo’ of a canyon wall and getting instead the ‘I love you’ of a nymph watching Narcissus waste away. It is harder to write, stranger to follow, but not a bad way to live a life.

 

I might have shaped my days before. Knowing I have a dance the next day I might prepare scones for tomorrow's breakfast, a sweetness that might dribble into the evening when I stumble on a kindness not my own.

 

I still do it out of habit, but these days it is less about shaping and more about surrender, a listening to the inherent pattern. I don't know why it's begun to change.

 

I can only adapt.

---

 

When Eithne comes in she has a man with her. His name is Jay, I learn. He watches her with eyes that follow a little too close. I don't like him. She seems normal, and greets me with a “I missed you,” that brings my heart up, and a “You look nice tonight,” that  suddenly catapults my new shirt into my new favorite shirt. Jay is watching our hug. I consider an instinctive gesture, maybe meeting Jay’s eyes over her shoulder, gaze held just a moment longer. Touch her and I'll kill you, hanging in the air.

 

But then the moment is over and she's cooing over the letter Papa gave her, and I am a coordinator tonight, friendly, welcoming, not making claims I have no right to make.  Jealousy does not serve me here. I slide in - introduce myself, and learn this is his first time. I offer to teach him. He turns me down, flustered somehow- as if he thinks I'm coming on to him?

 

He has the feel of a pickup artist, awkward with anyone who's not at just the right angle to see the mask he wants to show. Single minded and disregarding the people in between. I am not coming on to him. I watch as he goes over to Eithne, asks her to teach him, and she points him to me again. I show him basics - how our hands are held - and he’s terribly embarrassed to  be holding a guy's hands. He excuses himself shortly after. Leaves after that. It's not ‘his scene’ he tells me.

 

When he's gone Eithne pulls me aside to rant about him. She invited him to the dance not realizing he would interpret it as a date.

 

“He was being so clingy. The only way he would go is my telling him I'd have lunch with him tomorrow,” Eithne confides. “I really don't want to have lunch with him tomorrow.”

“Then don't,” I offer, “Boundaries.”

“I know, make sure I text him and cancel tonight.”

“Why not now?”

“Then he might come back!”

I hadn't thought of that.

 

We weave back into the dance. She's following more than usual, head cocked as if listening and then she asks, “can I show you something?”

“Of course.”

“Don't extend your arms all the way from your body,” she says and demonstrates. I try, fail, see what she means. I'm not moving my feet and making up for it by overextending. Arms close feels like I have more control.

Suddenly I'm indignant. “You're only telling me this now?”

“It took me a bit to put words to it.”

Less indignant. I understand taking time to put things into words. The song ends and we sit down together. Conversation drifts back towards Jay.

 

“I could warn him off for you,” I offer. Just give me permission!

“What do you mean?”

I struggle with words. “You know - when guys alpha-male each other, it’s -” Instinctive, an unspoken dance that's always going on, the testing of edges and ownership, like wolves snapping at each other, testing strength, deciding if it's worth a fight. His kind don't care enough to fight. I settle for “He wouldn't bother you again.”

She laughs, high and tickled, “What would you say?”

I don't know. Touch her and I'll kill you, but in more words. “It would be so easy in person, it's a way of moving, a gesture. With him gone I'd have to facebook message him . . .” a pause “I'd say - ‘Just so you know, Eithne has a lot of friends, and if any boundaries are crossed, I don't think you'd like the consequences.”

“Friends" she says, with finger quotes, then laughing, a sideways tilt to her head. “So you're saying I'm a lip s**t.”

“I didn't say . . .” she's laughing uproariously now, all I can do is join in.

Then she pauses, “Oh, you mean there are a lot of people who have my back - not that he'd have a lot of competition.”

“I mean, there is overlap between the two.”

---

Jealousy is a Scorpio’s greatest struggle, or so I'm told. It plays with all our themes. Honesty, trust, and the layer beneath the surface of things. When you're about to die, it's the emotions and instincts that take hold, and few things are more instinctive than protecting what is mine.

 

I remember when I faced jealousy in the face the first time, a girlfriend who didn't trust me with another woman. I was horrified by that lack of trust. Didn't she see I was a good person who would never betray her? After she broke up with me I ended up with the other girl, kissing behind her boyfriend's back. Huh. He never knew, but he was jealous too.

 

I always want to think I'm an exception to the rule. That I'm bigger than the instincts that have shaped us for a million years - and my relationships transcend all conventional wisdom. Only, seven relationships have shown me I'm stupid and my emotions knew what was going on all along.

 

Each emotion is a chemical cocktail engineered to step us sideways into a complex. They arise when I'm too slow to respond correctly, each holding an instinctive script that plays against other emotions in other people. Contained in my emotions is more knowledge of the way the world works than my puny lifetime will ever understand.

 

Like when seducing a woman- they all have a path and it's as simple as following it. Seduction is an instinctive thing - where I let go and step sideways into myth. I become archetype and she responds, and I've woken up and wondered how I managed to get this beautiful woman beside me in bed. Not remembering the how, and suddenly realizing it wasn't me who won her, and it's up to me to keep her.

 

But jealousy. I wonder what is in its chemistry. It is not anger, I hold anger like a hot pepper burning in my chest. It is not love, not the fluttering in my stomach, the uncontrollable shaking, the single minded focus on making her laugh one more time at any cost. Jealousy is like a lake monster rising from the depths of my stomach through my chest to look out of my eyes. Rivulets of blood cascade around her. She breathes fire but she is cold and calculating and will do whatever it takes to keep what's mine. Because that is the way of the world.

---

 

Being so big, it takes a while for her to sink down into the depths of my stomach where she coils sleeping. I notice this as I watch Eithne and another man sit on the couch talking. This one is new too, but he thanked me as I taught him basics, and really got into it. He has a good smile and nothing hiding behind. I like him.

 

But it's a break in the dancing and it's just me on the floor, and he's stopping me from asking Eithne to dance because that would be rude, and the lake monster rises a little from her slow descent and I don't think she serves me now, but I don't get to make that call - so I start dancing jealousy, taking heat and spreading it down into my feet and out into my fingertips. She is such focused fire.

 

Then an African drum beat comes on and I'm dancing with Johannah and we start rocking to the heartbeat of it, slapping each other's bodies in beat, stomping in beat, and blood, blood - I can hear it rushing through my veins, caring the remnants of jealousy heat, heat, to my bare feet stomping on the wooden floor, then back again, through my liver cleansing, cleansing until I'm clean.

 

Then I'm dancing with little Katie to an Irish jig and spinning her around, and moving so fast she's exhausted when we finish but giggling too, and so the night goes.

 

Eithne takes me home, and we sit in the truck outside Mama's.

“Don't let me forget to text Jay.”

“Do it now,” I say.

“But it's going to take a while to get it right.”

“You have an editor.”

“Okay.” I watch her face as she texts, speaking each word aloud. It's good, clear, direct. The only thing I don't like is the offer to still be friends, but I don't think it's for me to council otherwise.

 

When she's done, she tells me about Jay sincerely complimenting her, getting her number, texting all the time, asking if he can kiss her, and her saying yes as long as ‘it doesn't mean anything.’

 

We are all forever thinking ourselves exceptions.

 

“I had to tell him to stop twice. Afterward, my body felt like something bad had happened but it felt good to me.”

 

Twice? A fist clenches on its own and then unclenches with will. I'll kill him. But she can take care of herself can't she. You can be precious without needing to be protected.

 

“I have this thing where I think I need to be in a committed relationship to have sex. I don't know why. I'm sick of waiting.”

 

She pauses, giggles, “You know Mars?” I do, We used to play fight when I was a teenager. “I've been playing with the idea of just walking up and asking him to have casual sex with me. But then what if I get triggered and there's nobody to support me . . .” she trails off.

I check in this pause to see if this elicits any jealousy. No. Apparently casual sex means less in my book then intimate conversation.

She continues “But then I was thinking about how I'm going off on this trip and I don't want to be in any emotional state then, so I have to wait until after that . . . And then I'm teaching in early August so I have to be at my best there - so that gives me at least two months before I can do anything stupid.”

 

I chuckle, she is definitely, unequivocally, a Judger - a planner. I'll have to ask if her periods help her control the uncontrollable. She might relate to trying to schedule lost days.

 

Jay texts back and she groans and reads it aloud. The usual. I get to watch a flurry of texts back and forth.

 

“Why are you sugar coating it, when you were so clear before?” I ask.

“He isn't listening to the original text, so I'm giving it to him in a way he can take.” Wow - how many times have I been confused by an initial message being harsh and then saying something less harsh after. I've never had it explained so clearly.

 

When it's done and she's written “I want to be friends” for the fiftieth time, she collapses sideways against my chest. Tired. I consider whether I'm allowed to tell a story, and which one. One about being patient with yourself and not rebounding on weird guys I don't like who you met in coffee shops and don't stop the first time. I can't sort the personal from the wise right now so I stay quiet.

 

We call it a night - moving out of her truck to hug.

“You're a good - no, Great, friend Pan.” Not ‘friend' not when it's just been used as a let down, no matter the adjective, don't compare me to him, but I'm not sure what the right word is, so I leave it be. I go inside, set up my bed, and open the computer. I track down Jay, forge a message telling him to back off, which I don't send, but stash for future need. It's 1:00 when a “Hello far away friend!” from Artemis startles me out of refreshing my Facebook feed and lets me get up and make myself food. She probably falls asleep at her keyboard because there is no further messaging, but she helped all the same.

 

Blood cycles through me. I do what I can to release the heat but it fades slowly, and the internet only aids in the sleepless mind's wandering. There is so much to let go. To bleed out.

 

The night kisses four before I crawl into bed and sleep.