It is too early, or too late, and you are scrubbing your underwear in the bathroom sink. The light is white, and cold, and the water is pink, and cold, and your fingers are stiff, and cold. Ice water and hand soap, the tried and true recipe for unset bloodstains. Itβs unsettling something else, too; something coming undone in your chest and pushing your lungs into your throat. A Gordian knot that loosens and loops until you are so tangled you lay down and hold still, the better to swallow your frustration my dear. It is shame, perhaps, or shame by another name. There is this thought that turning your hands into blunt instruments by freezing the blood in your veins will keep it from seeping hot and sticky and clotting like your frustration in your hair and your throat, and you just want to be clean. By morning your fingers will bend again, but there will always be a faint stain, a pink ghost that you cannot scrub out. A tiny haunting, a sigh on laundry days. But thereβs no use crying over spilled milk, or blood, as the case may be. Only more threads to pick at, more low and high pressure fronts moving through you; lightning in the roots of your teeth, acid rain being used as bleach.