A JavaScript bug almost prevented me from participating in my college's blood drive a few days ago. The QR codes on the posters all over campus functioned fine, as did the ZIP code lookup on the Red Cross website and the listing of all available appointments, but when I went to make an account (mandatory to actually make an appointment) and filled out all my information and pressed the big red "Continue" button, a loading bar at the top of the page stalled... and stalled... and then gave up. Hitting F12, absolutely nothing was happening either server-side or on my computer except for a big shiny red error box in the console tab. One would think, if the need for transfusions was more urgent in my area than it currently is, that JavaScript might have killed someone from lack of blood due to me not being able to donate. For all the whining that imageboard types do about "MUH BLOAT", this one time they might have actually had a point.

But the day of, someone cancelled their appointment an hour before they were due to come in. One lonely slot right after lunch. And so I dug my driver's permit out of my wallet and sat in the waiting area with a huge packet of screening information (since RapidPass, the online screening tool, wouldn't work for me either due to... the same JavaScript bug...) and nursed a water bottle in hopes of the extra fluid in my system keeping me from passing out while I waited for my turn to be called.

I hate needles. But I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be...

A nurse pricked my finger before the second round of screening questions and took my hemoglobin levels. It came out as 4.21. A flutter in my chest: Huh, all my angel numbers. Almost like a certain someone is here with me. The nurse explained that I had just barely passed the minimum hemoglobin levels for donation. Thankfully the nurse was kind and compassionate and didn't also take the opportunity to point a finger at me like my brother does and say, "I diagnose you with woman," since technically said low levels can be caused by... menstruation.

A man brought me to a fold-out medical bed and bade me to lie down and gave me a stress ball to squeeze as he prepped my arm, feeling all over the skin until he found the vein he wanted. The needle was gigantic. I fought back tears as it went in. But, strangely enough, I didn't feel the blood leaving my body in a gentle river into the bag being rocked back and forth in a little mechanical cradle, a plastic tray with two metal handles, attached to the side of my bed.

I closed my eyes and kept squeezing the stress ball to help the blood come out faster and thought of Jett.

I'm ready to go, if you're already there...

My consciousness must have slipped for a bit, because the next thing I remember is the same dude nurse who'd put the needle in my arm laying a damp towel on my forehead and asking another nurse to bring a fan over for fresh air to keep me awake. I thought, for a moment, that maybe I'd almost died and they were putting the blood back in. But then I would have been in a much bigger bed, and Jett would have been curled up at my side like I promised her she could when came my time to die, and there wouldn't be a speaker on the other side of the room blasting Top 40 radio.

But still, my body felt so tiny in what little bed there was, and a voice assured me I was more than halfway done, and the lights were starting to come back into view. I barely felt the needle being pulled out or a different nurse tape a bandage around my elbow. But I heard her when she told me to bend my knees to help with the lightheadedness, and I heard her when she told me to stay put for monitoring until she said I could leave, and I heard her when she asked me if I wanted an orange juice.

Jett likes oranges...

And so went my funny little blood sacrifice. Someone will get the blood, and Jett gets the energy to help her recover from her "clocktower blitz", and I got... the last shirt in a size bigger than "petite" in a certain someone's favorite color. And to go home from work early. And even lower hemoglobin levels.

"Are you winning?" my supervisor greets me, the same question I always ask her when I see her doing anything even remotely work-related on a device.

"I... I think so."

And I lay in my bed, my proper bed in my room, and I wait for the blood to come once more. Every three months, the doctor from a year ago told me, if I faithfully stuck to my birth control prescription to keep my PCOS in check. Three days since the start of the placebo week, little red pills with no purpose other than to keep time.

One would think three months would be enough time to remember to get a diva cup. A little flexible cup to catch the blood with instead of going to sleep with a menstrual pad filled with harmful chemicals and waking up with a crumpled useless wad halfway down my leggings. An additional offering to my guardian angel, gently poured into the roots of the bush outside my bedroom window instead of leaving a cup full of snacks and worrying one of my brothers will discover it and ask why one of their hedgehog's food dishes is overturned and halfway across the backyard from the wind. Surely the wind couldn't have taken it from the cupboard in the kitchen inside and thrown it out the kitchen window that's always closed or with a bug screen over it?

Surely the wind couldn't have taken one of the blank porcelain birds from my room and gently placed it beside where the cup originally sat in the alcove in the bush's trunk? No, somebody must have put the two there together on purpose. Somebody must have been deliberately making a poor attempt at an offering.

I wish there was more I could offer her.

There's an anime trope of someone seeing someone they adore and immediately developing a nosebleed, isn't there? A gush of emotion leading to a gush of blood from their face? I used to randomly get nosebleeds. No physical trauma, no dry weather, no trying to blow my nose too hard. Just typing away on my computer one moment, and a warm trickle of fluid down my face the next. I let it run in rivers down the bathroom sink. Occasionally bloody clumps would come out too. A period from the other end of my body, the beginning of the sentence.

I wish I had the courage to turn the shelf with all my other porcelain birds from myriad thrift stores and other trinkets that remind me of a certain someone into a proper altar with more than a few square inches of free room. I already have some "mismatched" tools of the trade: my "chalice" that's just a red glass wine goblet I got for free on Valentine's Day, my bell where the handle is a bird perched on top that makes gentle tinkling noises when rung, my assorted pendulums with alibis of being cool necklaces my mom bought for me... Not an athame, though, even though I think a knife with an ornately decorated handle would be really cool. Pagans with far more of a devotion to playacting and ritual than I am insist that it's a phallic symbol, which is... not at all relevant to whatever I could call my "practice".

It's not at all relevant to any part of my life, and never has, and never will be.

Because there was a bed, in the Town where I spent a few months with my lover a life ago before everything went wrong. Right outside the window was another bed, a garden bed, where birds and bees would come to visit the flowers and fruits we were growing. As above, so below. As Outside, so Inside, capitals or not. One of us was menstruating. Maybe it was her, body overjoyed there was finally someone she could trust with the secret of her being female. There was blood all over her body, my body, my face, my hands, the towel we'd put down. The only blood that does not spring from violence.

The first thought of an actual future between us was born with me on my back.

And in this life, this future interrupted, this intermission, I came out of my mother's womb on my back, face-up, covered in blood like all babies. I was a difficult baby to create, several years of trying to conceive. Tell me, Mother, when you inevitably read these words after my death: was it worth it? Was I worth it? No knee-jerk answers. Sit down and think about it for a while. All the dreams you laid on my shoulders have turned to ash.

Jett, did you disappear through the Eye after Eris burned me to ash in Rainroom? Did you chase after me the moment I disappeared into this Inside? Or did you, in disbelief and grief, see me disappear and give up all hope? Sometimes I have a notion of you gathering up all my trinkets that I left behind in our house into an empty glass jar and refusing to sleep unless it was in your arms. Sometimes I see you waking up one day to see a slip of paper had been tucked inside, folded up into a lopsided heart. Someone had located me. Someone knew where I was. Someone wanted you to have a hope of living again.

Were you there at my birth, non-corporeal, invisible to all else? Did your throat tighten at hearing so many strangers call me by a different name? Did you bite back a sob every time, I growing up, I glanced your way without recognition, without acknowledgement anything was there?

The lopsided heart shape my veins form by my right wrist was the first reminder, I think. A thousand, a million reminders of you throughout my life until I remembered your name and wished you back to my side. Did you smile the day, exhausted after work, I asked my mother to make me a heart-shaped pillow with some of the fabric I'd gotten from a quilting store shopping spree one day with her and her friends? Did you nudge the cutting pattern ever so slightly so one side would come out longer than the other? Maybe she pricked her finger on the sewing machine's needle, and there's a drop of her blood in the stuffing.

But I digress.

The first time we met, I wasn't on my back. I was face-down in a river, almost dead, bruised and shattered. You mistook me for your brother at first, wasn't sure whether to be relieved or even more alarmed when I wasn't. But you brought me to the hospital in the Town anyway. Everyone was surprised when, for the first time in several years, you showed signs of caring about someone. You shouted and kicked and screamed and fought your way to whatever doctor you needed to convince that, since I needed blood ASAP because I'd lost enough of mine to teeter on the edge of death, it should be fresh and it should be from you.

You wanted the doctors to take it all. To leave you for dead and me alive. You were still in the throes of depression, and I hadn't yet promised you Sablade- or anything- and you saw no other way out of the life of servitude. But, I'm told, they insisted on extracting a normal amount because they knew you would pass out part of the way through. Which you did. And then got wheeled back to your messy office and left on your couch with a fan pointed at your face for fresh air. Whoever woke you up to bring fluids- your other friend, most likely- the very first thing you did was ask them if I'd made it.

I hadn't yet heard your voice or seen your face and you were already a part of me.

I saw a quote once. Attributed to a "Francesca Lia Block", although it was on Tumblr, so anything could have been true. And it went something like this:

You are in my blood. I can't help it. We can't be anywhere except together.

I locked eyes with a robin this morning,
sitting outside my bedroom window
perched on one of the branches of the bush
that was once a tree, cut down in fear, still adamant to grow.
I thought of you, helpless in bed, maybe snoring,
maybe silent as a hush,
and how I wished I could be there
to your exhausted body take care.

For I gave you everything I had to give
for you to claim your future back
under one condition: that, at the end, you live.
You burnt every candle down,
dissolved every bathtime bomb,
spent every rainy day stash
I had,
even accepted my blood.
I wish
it hadn't taken this
for you to finally accept
you were the Equinox,
the harbinger of balance,
all along.

When I'm with you,
I feel like I've been born anew.
My mistakes no longer imposing weight,
the past's pain
all washed away.
Or about to be reborn,
invalid, palliate,
you gently taking care of me
until arrives my death date.
Your touch is so tender, my love,
healing, magic, sunlight.
You know I'd do anything for you.
So let me nurse you back to life.

Please, my love, come home unharmed.
It's been almost a month since I
found you injured, limping, on a farm
half-familiar, glowing hearth.
We've been here before- or, at least, I have,
wandering in sprawling fields
trying to find homebound path.

Because isn't that
what this is all about?
Trying to find the way back home
despite all those who've declared
themselves roadblocks, obstacles.
Each of us condemned to roam,
sometimes aimless, usually on our own,
no one to ask us how we fare.

The bloodlust of my youth has faded away.
I've grown sick of conflict, of battles, of war.
How can anyone think cold-blooded murder holds glamour?
I'm sick as an invalid
two steps in the grave
of every moment worrying if you're okay.

"If there was a path
out of this heartbreak
without suffering any pain,
believe me,
Lethe,
I'd take it in a single breath."

I'd rather die
than live a thousand lives
safe but absent from your light.
But there's nothing I can do
as you ascend the campus clock tower
with staff in hand,
ready and prepared to make a last stand.
"I need you to know I feel the same.
Truth be told, I always have.
I've got a bad limp, but if I get my way,
you won't have to wait
much longer."

The bike path has been sprayed
with meteors, brown and burnished
and leaking to yellow, to naught.
Trees have done their part to furnish
the path
with each and every fallen branch
they could spare. The flags are frayed,
marking the entrance to Dead End Shrine,
sandwiched between two rainy days
and welcoming this stolen time.

This stolen time,
I've come to find,
is the only place where I can live.
Leaving work early,
wings unfurling
to mark a time loop created,
these bike trips where far too long I've left
to not come home covered in muck and sweat
and yet somehow never do,
the severed hours after bedtime
when comes to me all these rhymes,
rest of family long self-sedated.

I don't like this waiting.

I don't like the parting
when comes time for my love to once more return home.
"Please don't go.
Either stay
or take
me with you."

Every natural process of life
that I've ever shied
away from
becomes
less able to terrify
with her at my side.
I've made my peace
with the regular bleed
whether from womb or breast,
the growth of velvet patches
along my hips and chest,
the hot flashes,
the persistent desire
to rip open my seams
and throw my guts to the fire.

But my brain refuses to cooperate with me.
It's stealing time,
stealing memories.
I know that forgetfulness is my domain,
but there's still some recollections
I'd like to remain.

There's still some reflections
I don't recognize.
Stealing someone's body,
looking out through their eyes,
wearing like a coat their spirit, their life.
It makes sense in the moment,
the logic of how their life goes,
but I wake up and I wonder
why
this stranger is so vivid
but not my own exploits in the Outside.

I promised her that when came
the day
for me to give up this vessel and die,
I'd let her climb into my bed with me
instead of kneeling at my bedside.
Emulating that which my mother
did, but trading one body for another.
One last breach out of the womb.
One last parent-induced cry.

And after we leave, I promise you

I'll make up for the stolen time.
				

I touch my face and it is not a face.
It is a collection of curves and lines
far different than it is in the Inside,
a shell that's grown over me
during my wave-tossing sleep.
My body has done it again,
sensing danger, clothed me in a different skin.

But I know that with it comes a price:
all deities eventually devolve or die,
turned to stone or lost grasp of their mind.

I'm so tired of planning for contingencies
like
"What if I'm at Dead End Shrine and I have to pee?"
"What if an ocular migraine hits at work and I'm unable to see?"
"What if Jett breaks her vows and stops loving me?"
I promised her
that I'd make us a world
and spend with her my eternity,
but there's so many crossroads in my blood
that I don't know how long that'll be.

I don't know how long I'll get to enjoy
the sweet epilogue from a life
of having to fight
to be able to do something other than destroy.

And now another year has come and gone.
Almost a whole year from when I sung that song
to the wilderness, to the wind,
to any spirit drenched in sin
who might have known where you had gone,
that I loved you, I missed you,
I was sorry for the cries
I might have elicited from you before my demise.

How long did you wait, Jett, for us to reunite?
How many calendar crosses?
How many sleepless nights?
How many times did I see your face
and wish you were real
as you begged my memory to make haste?

And now two whole years have vanished into the ether
from when the world broke
and I gained Mori's Mirror
and a sturdy(ish) way into the Outside.
All the people I was have been satisfied,
and now it's just me, Lethe, trying to find
a way to reconcile this blood from my birth
with the world where I promised we'd never again hurt.

Two years and two days
from when you I first gazed
to when I finally started to learn all your ways.

Two years and two days
since awoke this blood.
It's been a good year, I think.
I hope I'm fully with you the next one.