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That was the summer I couldn’t stop bleeding. Sometimes it was
semi-normal things: I’d blow my nose and it would bleed, just lightly,
but for a long time. Or I’d feel a sudden cramp low in my side,
and the next time I went to the bathroom I’d be spotting—again lightly,
like I was thirteen years old, but for a long time and in the middle
of the month. Mary-Alice, my neighbor, said it was probably stress
or poor nutrition. She asked me if I was eating enough protein,
enough iron. Then I started getting cuts. Long, jagged slashes on
the backs of my arms, shallow digs on my stomach and down my thighs.
I could be doing anything, the laundry, watching tv, and they would
open right up out of what seemed like perfectly healthy skin. It
didn’t even hurt, and most of the time I would only notice when
the blood dripped onto my clothes or—if the cut was on my stomach—blotted
through my shirt and made the fabric stick to me.
She never said, but I think Mary-Alice thought I was cutting myself,
until one opened up right in front of her when I was over at her
house drinking coffee. We were looking at another cut lower down
on my forearm or we might not have noticed, but as it was we were
both looking at that particular patch of skin—just under the swell
of my palm—when it unzipped itself. It was a shallow, thin cut,
like you might get if you caught yourself on an edge slamming a
screen door, or if a cat scratched you. The way it moved, zigging
down my arm and ending in a little flourish near the joint of my
elbow, was almost playful.
“You see?” I said. “You see, it’s just like that...”
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