What does it mean to lose our blood? An insignificant thing. Trivial, really. We do it all the time. While shaving our faces, or our legs. While working with iron and wood; with knives and vegetables. When we play, and when we fight.
But our blood can be apart from our bodies. It is a shared, finite commodity. Metaphorically. Genetically. Lots of it is shed even during a normal birth. The process of its tidal currents, those within us and without, sweeping us up and away on the opaque back of its pressure and time. All of it blurring together in a red mist.
Until at last, when we thought that we might not leak any more of it, a child, our child, safe from everything except our fear, or so we thought, is yanked away, in an explosion of scarlet jets too horrible to imagine. And the river of that place, and the ebb of that time, drowns us over and over. And finally we are able to believe in hell and its unforgiving horror. It was never as distant as we thought it to be, nor as divorced as we needed. It began when we began, pumping our energy, and prompting our movements, and now it will never cease.
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