There is nothing unusual about this moment, aside from the blood on my hand. I'm not sure when it got there, but it certainly came as a surprise. I had reached down to turn up the volume on my ipod and saw this streak of red on my hand.
So I've stopped here in the median dividing the road I've been walking, completely unsure where the hell my blood just came from, and started searching my body-- a slightly more important variety of the just-leaving-home pocket-check. Wallet? Phone? Keys? Check, check, check. Hands, neck, face? Check, check, and… I pull my hand away from my face. Another streak, splotched against my palm, bright red in the way that you would think was fake if you saw it in a movie. You would sit in the theater and see this bright red blood and say, you’ve ruined the moment, I know this is fake, and now I can see that everything is fake. But here this unlikely color is on my own hand, and it came from my own nose, and moments ago it had been flowing around in my own body.
So, I have a nose bleed. Not a problem, really. I'm headed for a drug store anyway, I can just buy some Kleenex or toilet paper and jam it up whichever nostril, and then walk back home with a white ball of fluff hanging out of my nose. This sort of thing would have bothered the Old Me, the Me from before I started going to therapy, but the New Me quickly rationalized. I realized that no one who saw me on the street (if they looked at me at all) would really find anything unusual about the cotton in my nose— everyone has nose bleeds, and I had never encountered anyone who knew of a better way to take care of one than just plugging your nostrils.
And... and if they looked and pointed and stared at the white fluff on my face, I would be perfectly entitled to scowl back at their ignorance, for who were they to not know what a nosebleed was?
I knew that scowl well—I had received it before, as a child, when I saw a tiny woman get on the bus with a giant powdery gray smudge on her forehead. I had looked at her and she looked right back at me with a face that told me that I was the one at fault in this impromptu staring contest, and not her. She had made this smudge herself-- I knew immediately I had been foolish to assume otherwise. When I asked my brother about it later, he told me that she wore ashes to remind herself that she was going to die. The opposite, really, of a nosebleed, where we wear bloody scraps of paper in our nose to remind the world that we’re not going to die, not quite yet, and we’ll be keeping the blood in our bodies just a little longer, thanks.
My nose is, nevertheless, dripping its own reminder of my mortality. I can taste blood in my mouth now, and the drug store is still a block away. I wipe off my lip and stick my little finger inside my right nostril, then my left. This is far less elegant than the toilet paper method. That, you can wear with pride, with the I-know-what-I’m-doing scowl. But now people will see me and say, look, he’s picking his nose, how silly. I take my finger back out. There’s no blood on it. Unusual.
I rub my nose with the back of my hand, sniffling. Now there is blood all across the back of my hand, even brighter red than before. Ah, I see now. My nose is bleeding, but from the outside. This is a new problem, a harder one to solve. You can’t just stick toilet paper right there on their skin. Or rather, you can, people do, but not for something like this. If its in the right spot, you can point there and say, look, I cut myself shaving. But you don’t shave the outside of your nose.
I cross my eyes and can see a bead of blood forming off on the right side of my nose, far darker than the obnoxious bright red stuff that is now in streaks across my hand. I try to apply pressure with my finger, and now I look not like someone picking their nose, but some demented Santa, touching his nose with a wink before… what? Going into Kinney Drug?
But its really too late to do anything useful. I walk into the drug store with blood all over my nose, on my hands. And now people are really staring. I try not to hear what they’re thinking, but I do. Oh dear, they think, this boy is bleeding and drove all the way to the drug store for a band-aid. Or maybe, if they’re kind and think I’m the sort of person to own his own band-aids, they think I have AIDS or cancer or some other terrible affliction, and this blood flowing around my nose is just the visible bit of it, something so trivial when you consider the iceberg of sickness inside that I don’t even care that my nose is bleeding.
I consider heading straight for the Kleenex, ripping it open right there and paying for whatever’s left of it once I’m finally ready to check out. But I didn’t come here for Kleenex, and I was always taught to keep my priorities straight, so I head for the foot care aisle, for the wart that had appeared on my hand. While I’m pondering the different ways I could either burn or freeze away this unwelcome part of my own flesh, my nose stops bleeding all by itself. I don’t dare poke it to check, but if I strain I can see a tiny, darker red scab where this cut was just a few moments ago. I pick out some acid band-aids—incredibly deceptive, I think, that I’ll soon be wearing these and the world will think I’m healing myself all the while as acid is bubbling away at my skin—and I head for the counter, eyeing the Kleenex aisle as I go—but why bother with it now? I put the fake band-aids on the counter and hand over my money—no receipt, thanks, just the change. The woman checking me out pauses before she hands it over. She looks at my hand. Hers won’t seem to open and drop the change, and for an instant it is just suck, hovering above my own. I don’t know if she’s looking at the wart, nasty thing, or the blood that makes it look like I’ve just killed something. I’m about to point to the scab on my nose, as if that were any real explanation, but then the change drops and I can walk out the door, unnoticed again.
