The Crimson Tears
One in the morning and she is awoken by something—a sense, a sensation—at first unclear. She can feel that her face is wet, slick with something. It takes her but a moment to realize that her face is wet with her own blood. A nosebleed, she reassures herself, nothing more. She is, lest you worry, reader, right that no great misfortune has befallen her. So she drags herself out of bed, one hand pressed to her face to keep from leaving a crimson trail spattered on the floor as she makes her way across the bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom.
She turns on the bathroom light and checks herself in the mirror. It’s not a nosebleed; no, the blood has come up out through the lacrimal ducts in the corner of her eyes—she has cried blood, tears of crimson hue—as if she were a statue in a supposed miracle, claimed redolent of the mysteries of God, the universe, and beyond. There she stands in the mirror facing, a sublime sight, the red streaming out from the corner of her eyes and down her cheeks. That can happen in a nosebleed if the circumstances are right. Alas, there’s hardly any time to appreciate the picture. Still the tears of blood flow and flow and her hand is stained carmine, dripping, like the hand of a vicious murderer right in the midst of that brutal act. But it is only her own and that seems scarcely a thing for anyone to be concerned about, even when it comes in the form of tears. With the change in body position, blood is finally now beginning to pour out in earnest, and threatens to overflow her hand. So quickly, for quickly is needed, she thrusts her head out over the sink, letting the basin catch the falling fluid as she blindly gropes to the side for a tissue to stanch the bleeding.
By now the white porcelain of the sink is streaked alizarin in fractal patterns that form strange and wondrous shapes. One could almost play at guessing images, at imagining some scene and significance to the patterns, like one might, particularly as a child, when looking at clouds, or an inkblot. Or something more, perhaps. Like reading tea leaves to divine the future—and what might they say about hers? For her, at the moment, there is only the moment, only this. No, the present preoccupies her; by happenstance, it is only of the present that she is mindful, only this now. And it is in that now that she finds she cannot help but notice the fullness of texture and the depth and richness to the intense red of her blood; it calls out to her and takes hold. The more she looks, the more she finds herself entranced by the sordid beauty of the bloody sink; and she is held captive by the crimson of her tears.
When she has at last brought the bleeding under control and blood pours forth no more from her eyes, she finds herself in an unexpected quandary. There in the sink before her, against the glistening pure white of its porcelain basin, there the glorious crimson has formed such a pattern she cannot but be enthralled. It is art—no, no, to her in this moment, it is more than art, an art beyond art—not merely beautiful, but beauty itself. Terrifying and beguiling all at once, there in the sink it has scaled the heights of both the beautiful and the sublime. A paean to the highest, a monument which announces to the world, Perfection can exist! And yet for all of that it remains blood, human blood, if her blood, dripped and spattered in a bathroom sink. She hesitates, doesn’t know what to do. And yet it must be ephemeral, mustn’t it? It must suffer and degrade and come to ruin as the blood dried out and underwent its natural progression. There is only the moment.