Blood Draw

Written by a friend from a weblog (Ozymandsss) - he's a medical student. And he likes creative writing.

Blood Draw

You watch it slide slowly away from you in vibrant ribbons, surging and pausing like a tentative infant’s crawl. Slowly but deliberately it traverses the distance between us, until it hangs for a moment at a point equally distant from you as it is near to me. It is suspended; unsure of to whom it belongs, measuring the familiarity from whence it came against the allure of a new and unknown current. For a moment, it is motionless in stalemate. Your silent will calls it back just as mine calls it forth.

But the pressure behind it builds, a living gravity compels it, and in a moment it rushes forward again. It streams in twisting lines down glass walls, to spill and pool in the chalice I hold in my hands. There, as its level rises and its temperature falls, it turns dark as if with decay and death for leaving you.

As it disappears into my closed hand, do you not think as I do, upon my dominion and your own vulnerability?

You trust me even as you grimace.

You smile at me even as you squirm.

You willingly give to me even as I take.

Do you stop for even a second and wonder to what end I deplete you? What is my will that would leave you dry?

When I came into the room to stand above you, did you wonder at my experience? You lie prostrate and expose for me your most bountiful of vessels. You bend at the wrist and I stare at skin that may have been meant once for a lover’s lips. But I see right through its paper thin grace. I sit at your side, a needle in my fingers and thoughts.

As I kneel at your side, you are confident in my ability. You are assured of my technique.

And yet, like the withering of grass or the cracking of earth, my appearance is a harbinger of drought for you.

But it is a drought that you will quietly endure. For me.

As I wrap and choke your limb tightly, its most peripheral of rivers begin to surge in protest, do you wonder if I would allow you to do the same of me? Such an intimate exchange that now takes place between you and I, surely the faith is reciprocal.

I tell you, I would not.

I would not let another take a single drop of me.

I would not willingly watch my own living substance be transformed into sterile numbers another professes to have more meaning than I do right now, unpierced, unopened. Know that the trust you place in me, is completely unfounded.

For neither you nor I fully understand what it is I take from you. We say it is simply blood; that the volume I remove is so insignificant, so easily replaced by the very deep core that runs within your bones. And yet, perhaps a passing memory is caught between the cells and liquid that I draw into my needle. I picture you, some day many years from now, sitting alone in a room lit by a solitary lamp, your gnarled fingers loosely grasped around a glass of dark wine you drink alone. For seeming hours, you try to recall a thought of a distant child happiness or the grace of a loved one. You blink frequently as if to squeeze the memory from the dried sponge of your brain. But it is never to be retrieved again. It had long ago been drawn out of you. I carried it away from you for a time in a glass tube until it could be converted into a number. And then, when we determined it to be of a completely unremarkable value, indistinguishable and un-alarming, we threw it away amongst shards of broken glass.

I am frightened by the power I have to hurt you.

And I will tell you a secret.

You mistake purpose for knowledge.

I am not good at this.

Despite confidence smoothed like lotion across my skin, I am frightened by what I have been sent here to do.
Just as the skin of your wrist itches and retreats in fear of the instant it meets my needle, so does the hand that guides it fear the very same moment of union.

Just as your heart beats faster to make up for the volume I take from you, so too does mine quicken in the act of taking it.

For I have tried before but I have failed every time.

Their defenses were too hard.

Or mine were too soft.

I stare at the seams that make up your skin and pray for them to part just enough to let me in with ease.

I, more than you, wish that this could be done differently.

I would ask your own pools to bubble to the surface, like the waters of well irrigated lands after the rain. I would walk in them, submerged to my knees, and simply reach down and fill the cup of my fingers. I would raise them to my lips and taste of you and all that you were and are. And you would do the same of me, a mutual transfusion of our separate and sick lives, a donation of each other’s strength which renews us both.

But it is not to be.

It is simply me.

And it is simply my needle.

As my finger draws the skin of your wrist tight to expose your most vibrant of vessels,

Let us both quietly pray that we find the strength for this.
................

Posted with permission.