It’s the exact same thing again and again. Sitting around a table, sitting far away from each other, playing cards, losing, grandpa always wins. Everyone is ****** that he wins.
“That one person died.”
“That one person is in prison.”
“That one person is on a mission trip.”
Let me not talk.
Let me not invest in these people.
Let them live in their own world and let them be separate from mine.
Because blood binds us I am required to share it? I have to share my life with them? They have to take forced residence in my heart? They mock each other and laugh, they all laugh. I am no longer a target. For that I am grateful, but some things I cannot forget, I am indifferent to forgiveness.
It wouldn’t mean anything anymore. It has been so long that they would scoff or huff and say, “Well that was years ago.”, “I’m sorry you think you felt that way.” “You haven’t gotten over that?”
I was a child, I never had peers outside of a Sunday school. I had rationed time with friends for one and a half hours each week. My cousins have never been my friends. It has just been superficial “blood” that has bound us.
“Blood is thicker than water.” My water is holy, they nourish me and clear my skin, they make me enjoy drinking and the desperate breaths in between sips as I gulp them down. My water is a lake that is crystal clear that I love the sight of and to dive in and swim.
Blood just pumps, it tastes like the rusted iron of a dagger whose sting has been ignored by the wielder. Blood is red and thick and serves no purpose outside the body. I cannot feed a desperate man blood, I cannot give the sick a cold wet rag of sanguine redundancy.
“Blood is thicker than water.” Ice, *****. You can cool blood, save it for later but it sloshes around in the bag like a hornets nest. You can boil blood, seething in anger and be told you cannot speak out. My blood boils and I begin to overheat, steam pushes from my ears and I am being destroyed from the inside as my liver, lungs, and heart suffer the burns. You cannot regulate the temperature of your blood. Water is malleable, if some is poisoned you dilute it or remove it. If it is frozen you can warm it, it stings but it can still melt, if it is boiling you can give it ice to cool, or leave it alone to go down to a simmer in its own time.
The Blood I am condemned with cannot be removed, the thick blood of the body of the family is very hard to replace, I can cut off my own arm and let it drain out of me. Refusing to have any part in it, “But you need blood to live?” I hear it cry out to me in desperation and sickness.
“I will transfuse,” I retort, “I will find another whose blood runs as thick as mine and we can share, we will make our blood. We will cut our hands on the glasses we drank from and shake. I will take my blood and give it to others to share.
We make our own blood, we drink our own water, we have a filter. I would not drink foolishly from stagnant water, I am not a fool. I have tools to read if it is poisoned, I can see the brown clouds in the water, I see the deepness of the ocean and recognize its salt.
Trust me to choose my own drinking water. You made me drink tap for my whole life and now I visit a fresh spring and you tell me it is unclean?
You rinse yourself in a lazy river, filled with chlorine that ‘sanitizes’ but dilutes the water’s true nature. Floating and drifting in a circle with no excitement, no change.
You drink your own bathwater, subsisting off of your own dirt saying that you are pure. Walk out of your house, step away from your porch, the water supply will still be there. But visit the spring with me. It is not as heretical as you may think when you take a drink. Please, don’t make me bleed in order to not be thirsty. If I drown so be it, my lungs filled with clear water.”
