How To Let Your Hand Bleed
A love letter to women, and to myself.
Women are a language I love to read. They are always deliberate.
“I know what you mean,” she says to her, either through the frame of brows, or the nod moving the neck, or the rise of the chest, or the followed fold of the knee over the other. The choosy physicality, as well as the sound of how we speak to each other are both discreet, and obvious to anyone fluent. It is an intimate language.
I probably began learning it in church, as one would with the art of judgement, watching the women watch women. I remember there was something almost comical, yet more so sore about the way they — we would note each other: what she’s wearing, who she’s sitting with.
In theory it would be unwise to be so, well, distracted in a house of God the Father, but I was only ever caught by the gaze of the Blessed Virgin Mary: her palms open, with an expression across her face of still, perfect love. I find that I come across her far more often nowadays in my now ultra-secular life than I do that masculine renaissance you can only seem to find in a cathedral.
Naturally, I think often about how the Catholic Mother shaped the way I understand women, and how I understand myself. I feel now that regardless of the religion, or the consequential therapy, or the empowerment of education, the connections women make with each other is just as scared as prayer to a divine feminine. Every connection I have made with a woman in my life, whether hard or quick, has been its own offering of becoming the wiser.
An example: the way Kelly, one of my closest friends has always called me, “girly pop” while driving us in her dirty car to fake-fight over paying for a bottle from the local wine shop. When we air out what fires we’ve been keeping in our insides all day, what Kel always seems to conclude with is, “Well, guess what, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.” Her tone is consistently one of relief whenever she says this. She looks at me, breathing in a cigarette, and exhales. “Ya know?” We both slouch and nurse our glasses, and I slowly laugh at how relaxing is to agree with her.
Or here, let me share a hard one. When I’m in that car again feeling the air of far West Texas, I sometimes imagine it is still August in central Iowa. While Kel drives along the curves of the highway, I think if I touch the fast wind long enough, the landscape will almost feel like a texture of wild sage that grew in wide pot in a backyard.
Kneeling down to it, I remember the way I was told to pull its leaves up along the stem so that when I release my hand, it was covered with summer fragrance. The grower of this sage told me its property is “better than a bottle of something — anything.” Even though I am in this car, trying not to cry over her son, thinking about the sage his mother grew is almost an ironic, passing remedy to the pain.
I don’t have any sage plants of my own to mimic this with, but tending to this memory in a way reminds me, lovingly, to tend to myself. Learn to grow something. Let it make you smell good. If nothing really matters, or lasts either way, why wouldn’t you?
A different mother, I believe it was the grandmother, had a famous family one-liner in giving instruction to a son or someone who had cut themself and brought their minor wound into her kitchen: “Go bleed in the sink!” I love that line — that attitude. You almost have to whip your arm when you say it. “In the sink.” It’s not at all an aversion to the blood, it’s a more like a familiarity.
Don’t you know how stubborn blood can be if it stains a hand towel? How many times I’ve put a potion in the laundry? Blood is a knack.
Women may not always know why they love the way they do, but they always seem to know how they love. Sometimes they pray for the earth, sometimes they teach you how to work the element. Sometimes we just get drunk and talk, bleed, nod. I look at a Frida Kahlo self-portrait and best understand how her body is her honesty.
It’s easy for me to connect these images to my own mother. If I fall all the way back in my brain, I no more than three years old. Mom is throwing–literally–pounds of wet, rich, black mulch. She’s spreading the dirt across her garden in the glowy, green heat of an afternoon. I can still see she’s wearing a white tank top, outlined by a tan and has her thick brown hair tied neatly at the base of her neck.
She wipes the sweat from her face. Her nose, the only feature of my face that resembles hers, is now powdered with dirt. I look up at her from my lime green beach towel in total awe. If I slow the memory down, I remember her grinning at me, I can read her face. It’s so full, so much younger; catching a big breath. The way she looks at me in this moment is my first memory of, “I love you.”
I have recently decided to return to writing. Mom has a big plastic tote somewhere, still filled with pieces of colored construction paper awkwardly stapled together. She calls them my “books”. Every page is saturated with words written in Crayola marker.
Both of our favorites is my six-year-old self’s critical rewrite of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. Instead of the double-suicide, Juliet looks down at her dead Romeo and says, “Fool boy!”.
Miraculously, she then becomes a crown-wearing, monarch-winged supernatural being who flies far into the upper right corner of the last page. This artistic detail I vaguely remember; the lining of the old wooden floors in our house were not a great surface for drawing illustration.
At twenty-five now, this creative initiative from my much younger mind gives me such a deep joy. She hasn’t yet been with or without a man. An experience of running cold water over a cut to her small hand would not be poetic to her.
Little her has no idea other girls do not recognize Mother Mary or what she means; the concept that there are so many girls she’s yet to meet has no space in her mind. She’s happy to be, writing deliberately new.
