It’s not the kind that pours from a cut or memorializes itself as a scar. There is no wound to dress, no story of a fall or fight to explain it away. It is a constant, quiet seepage from some internal fault line I have never quite located. It simply exists. A rust-colored testament to a pain that has no name.
I wipe it onto my jeans, a habitual, practiced motion. When I bought them they were black, but now they lean a dull maroon, the fabric coarse and unforgiving against my thighs. I was worried about spending so much money on something I may not use enough, but they have become my prized possession.
A person across the street stops, their eyes hooking onto the motion, onto me. Their face contorts into a mask of pure disgust.Their eyes glower at me like they are daring me not to notice. But I see it—the faint, rusty smudge on their own palm, the quick, guilty way they shove it into their jacket pocket. They must have also wiped them. I let myself dream that we all do.
The walls of my house are painted red. I have grown accustomed to the color, to the way it swallows the light and throws it back, warm and metallic. My friend once called it bold, a statement. I almost laughed. It isn’t boldness; it’s the stark, screaming evidence of cowardice. It was desperation that made me dry my hands there, that had me pressing my stained palms against the pure white plaster, leaving behind the ghost of my touch again and again until the entire house became a monument to my bleeding. I was screaming for mercy, and I hoped the harsh color surrounding me could block out the noise.
I was tired of the stares from outside. I wanted to lean out the window and scream until my throat was as raw as my hands, “If you were constantly bleeding, wouldn’t you find somewhere, anywhere, to remove the stain? Wouldn’t you too ruin anything to make it stop for just a second?” But they don’t know. They don’t know what it’s like to be broken from the inside out. They don’t know what it’s like to be hurt so badly you can no longer trace the shape of the weapon, only the endless, leaking aftermath. When you cannot understand which direction the knife has come from, when you can only hold the knowledge that it is still inside you
somewhere, relentlessly twisting.
My family’s hands are cleaner than mine. My mother’s are scrubbed raw with worry, my brother’s are tucked safely in gloves of denial. Except for my dad’s. He prefers to wipe his by shaking hands with others, a smile plastered on his face, a firm grip that transfers his curse like a bad debt, a silent infection. He thinks he’s buying himself time, passing the coin of his pain to someone else’s purse. I used to do this. I used to think making my problems everyone else’s would dissolve them from me, that this blood was like precipitation, that it could evaporate and then move on. But debt collects interest. The burden I gave them, wrapped in the fragile paper of what I called love, always found its way back to me, returned by hands now stained with a familiar hue. Wiping your hands on others does not remove the violent color, It simply leaves
you with more hands to clean.
It is a sad, lonely curse because it feels so singular, so isolating. But sometimes, in that frozen moment when my eyes lock with the stranger across the street, I wonder. I wonder if he is staring because he does not understand the blood, or because he understands it all too well. Is his disgust a rejection of my stain, or a mirror of his own? Is he horrified by the visibility of my wound, or envious of it?
Sometimes I cannot bear the question. I retreat into my red cage, letting the walls absorb my silence.
But today… Today I did not look away. Today, I let his eyes follow the blood as it welled in the lines of my palm, gathered into a single, perfect bead, and fell, straight and striking against the dark gray pavement with a finality that was neither an apology nor a defiance.
A dark star against the concrete, waiting for the rain to come and wash it away, or for another foot to step in it and carry it onward.
“Here I Am” I yelled to him. He opened his mouth and for a second the hopeful part of me thought he would say something back. If we were in one of my dreams, he might have yelled back, “I See You.”
In this reality however, he simply turned away. Walked back towards his front door like he had seen too much of himself, like the world was too big for him today. The door was unlocked. He opened it with so much force I thought maybe somehow I had made him angry. He walked farther into the house, until I could no longer see him. But he didn’t close the door in time for me to not notice. To not observe the crimson that adorned his walls.
That night I laid in bed wondering. I could not tell if he had meant for me to see, or if he had simply gotten so used to his secret that he had forgotten there was anything to hide in the first place. Part of me will always question myself, wonder if I was mistaken, or maybe even deluded. There are many versions of this story I discuss with the dark, but there is no denying it. He had not seen me like I had hoped, I had seen him. I know now, I was never alone.
There are hands just as bloody as mine.
Crime/Mystery Film & Writing Festival 