Blood Not Granted

Nora N. Connor

What is a little sister but an explosion waiting to not-happen? I recall us, high school art class, end of a long adolescent day, preceded surely by a terrible night. Although in those days we had to get up so much earlier that the nights were short--the cycle of hysteria mercifully contained to the space of a few hours. My nights are a lot longer now and there's no telling when the line will fall flat. I remember you painting on my legs, a wide brush thick with bastardized blue tempera, pearly mixed with white and slowly coating shins, knees and thighs, the paint running out near the top, the texture ultimately cold and encasing. You were happy to introduce me to sensations as you came upon them, your spacy older sister unaware of reality of body even then. We drove home careful not to get paint on the car seats so we could have time to feel it dry.

I remember all those times I woke you up crying so hard all my bones strained to break, and look where we are now. Both inhabiting transient new spaces, running from old ones, we look back, we look ahead, we tell each other to think only about the next hour and nothing beyond that next hour: take it no further in your mind, sister. For who would abandon reality for a fleeting shape, ideas unformed in murky darkness? I don't know whether it's the bleeding I do, or the bleeding not granted me, that's slowly turning this anemia into a dying. Given my recent trend toward paralysis it seems that question will go unanswered along with so many others.

I love your tie with your blood. The ease. Never afraid to hold it, smear it, roll around in it, you pull it to the surface at will‹does it dry on your palms and crumble away, cellular dust to scatter and fall into crevices, microscopic traces? Does it leap at you in class later that morning despite your long polyester sleeves and ringless hands, glaring in dried half-moons, brown and stubborn under fingernails? You have found, it seems, that every one of these blood doors you claw open soon shuts itself, and more doors have to be clawed open, more maybe than you have to give. We know blood, we know it, its oxidation leads us through the emotions of color changes. You started out yellow‹overpowering yellow‹you were yellow in all early pictures. I can see them in vivid life like slides pulled up from the years and flashed in dreams‹I was green then, but we're both blood red now, and all red is really blue. All I own is blue, even our teeth are blue, little sis, but unless it's with you I don't like to play any color games. Blue is a color full of variation.

We both now worry and feel a bad floating, but in the end there's no deadline for anything we do. God knows we both could follow our own advice and learn not to plan ahead, especially since none of our observations are new. It's not a good idea to shed all illusions of a state at once; I find myself shivering staring at heaps of my furious fictions peeled away, I'm cold now, unclothed, unsweatered by my complexes. Your revolution maybe has come, and bloody though it's been, you are severed of all obligations to your former self, whether you choose to continue that person or not. But you too have known days the blood has not been granted. Some Sunday afternoons I sit on my bed like I imagine you might have sat on yours, holding it in your hands, the thought, turning it over and over and holding it close. How long is a pulse meant to go on beating? But that time came a different answer than the one you sought, and the blood continues to circle. Maybe a little piece of God was listening to the questions that day.

I am reminded of you at times, at odd radio moments‹there you are, smoking in the car, fingers tapping a blissful oblivion on the steering wheel in time to some trashy 80s tune‹how did you get to be so much more interesting than myself? Now I have been serving no important function in this world other than to the two important people I have been keeping alive‹you are one of them, and I am not. I don't know why that is. I know if I were to fade away the pockets of my own blood I'd leave behind would crave me‹about the rest, I can never tell. I have nothing but my wretched history to dictate the borders and depths of my humanity; it clings to me. All of my blind fumblings are directed toward casting it away. An amputation of this scale entails rivers of past-blood vast enough to set sail on. But then I think, how could such a loss possibly hurt me now, now that we are trapped again in these metaphors we worked, no, bled, so long to create‹prisoners of our own assumptions. It's not until I put if all together than I realize how little I have, but I have all this our blood inside me, and so do you, my fair O Negative. And this is what keeps us alive, what blankets us from the cold, mammals that we are. Blood, it's only with you I'm not taken for granted.

Go home!