Red Cross

As I begin to fade I can feel my body growing cold. My mouth is dry and rusty, my lips tingly with their slow loss of sensation. My hands begin to shake, and I find it ever more difficult to hold them where they are. I’m losing my grip. My feet are numbing ever so gradually. My toes will barely flex. The last sensation I begin to feel consciously is a dull but pervading thumping in the back of my head, just above my neck.

In the distance, I’m aware of the realization that this rhythm is my heartbeat. Almost. It’s slower than my heartbeat, more profound, more instinctive. The awareness spreads to all my organs, heightened by the deadening of my limbs. The vessels meant to keep me alive, usually forgotten, have come to occupy the whole of my being.

My mind wanders. Is this what it’s like to die?

Frigid ice lances through my arm and jolts me back to thought. This might be what it’s like to die. Two minutes to go. I can make it.

The last some-odd minutes my life has oscillated between red and clear. Red leaves, making me weary and numb and dropping me into the primeval of my organs. Clear returns, a freezing that numbs also but puts me back into a hazy mind. Every minute or so they switch. Numb and numb. Dying and sleeping. How did this start?

“Give me your hand,” she had said.

Red again. Black spots at the edge of my vision and I’m sinking. I can see the essence of my life moving away from me, taking with it energy and feeling and want. We’re waiting until enough is gone. Half a liter of me.

Clear again. I can see but I’m frozen. The clear isn’t what I need. It’s a replacement for the red, to keep my veins and arteries and capillaries from collapsing. But it won’t do what only the red can. The coldness makes me feel hollow.

“You’re going to feel this,” she had said.

Red again. The drop is a little higher each time. The red had begun with a burning and an excitement as I opened myself. Willing to give energy and feeling and want freely. Wishing I could give more, regardless of the fall.

Clear again. I’m dimly aware of the fact that the clear is mine as well, in some way. Despite this, our short time apart has made it cold, and the crystal coldness of it is alien to me. No one has ever cut themselves and seen emptiness come out.

“We’re done. You look pale,” she says.

She applies a thin band-aid that barely holds back what I continue to give.

I stand up. My limbs are weak and my vision unclear. The dull throbbing in the back of my head is deafening. I stagger away on unsure legs, full of my own cold nothing. Outside of my skin I tell myself to be patient. In time energy and feeling and want will flow back into my body from the deepest part of my bones, restoring the red of my life.

For now … I leave behind half a liter of me.