Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me – by Xiaole Zhan
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The title of this work is taken from Sylvia Plath’s poem, ‘Tulips’, first published in 1962 and collected in Ariel in 1965.
1.
I’ve had a recurring scene scorched in my mind since mid-winter 2020. I’m unsure whether the image emerged from a dream or if it grew from someplace in the dark wet of my brain like a tumour. The scene is of two people, each wearing a surgical mask. They have some kind of intimate relationship that cannot be entirely discerned, only there is a power imbalance – this is for sure – and while they attempt to speak to one another through their masks, the figure with less power suffers a nosebleed which slowly seeps through the blue cloth like a Rorschach moth.
2.
I re-read Sylvia Plath’s Tulips. I first read the poem years ago, but it made a meaningful impression on me only all these years later, as poems often do, like suddenly noticing a bruise on the inside of your arm that you can’t remember getting. For the first time, the last lines struck me in a way that hurt:
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salty, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
3.
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
I copied this line into my Google Docs diary. I texted my friend, M. Both times I typed this line, it appeared underlined in blue with the suggested correction: Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love for me. I understood then what I hadn’t years ago. I texted M:
She chose to write ‘love of me’
As opposed to ‘love for me’
As if the heart is using her
As if being alive costs
4.
The word choice is struck with cruelty. You are aware of your heart not as an instrument with particular love for you, but with a self-contained love of staying alive through you. Your heart opens. You deposit your coins. Your veins - your veins are a windfall! Your heart (the old brag) closes. You live.
5.
You live; you live; you live.
6.
I re-read Tulips in January of 2021. I was feeling already the beginning of what would be an enduring and recurring episode of clinical depression.
7.
During a blood test the nurse tells me I have difficult veins. The needle shifts uncomfortably inside my right arm. I exhale in relief when a cotton ball is finally pressed against the wound. But then the nurse says, Let’s try the other arm. I don’t have time to brace myself or to look away as a longer needle is pointed toward my left arm. This method will be a little more painful. I watch the barrel of the syringe bloom dark red.
8.
I can’t stop what happens next. My hearing dulls and narrows into a high-pitched ringing. The edges of my vision blacken.
9.
I was always a prodigious crier. I would simply tell myself I was sad and then the tears would fall, sure as the word therefore. I cried easily, pathetically, to the swell of violins or while reading about the lemonness of lemons in Ali Smith’s Spring. I cried because things mattered too much to me. However, in 2021 I cried constantly even though very little mattered to me at all.
10.
Walking, the act of walking, astounded me. Isn’t it strange how people walk step after step, over and over, with a natural impetus to get somewhere? The idea became incomprehensible to me. When you bring your pain wherever you go, there’s simply nowhere to get to.
11.
After half a year of being unable to dependably walk up and down stairs, I was forced to admit to myself that I was indeed depressed. When months of therapy didn’t alleviate my condition, I began to take antidepressants.
12.
My body stopped menstruating for three or four months at a time. It was like all that blood had been transformed into tears. It was one or the other; there wasn’t enough of me to go around. While on antidepressants, the suicidal ideation receded. I was feeling better, but I was still unable to menstruate regularly. Halfway through 2023, I was prescribed the minipill in an attempt to regulate my cycle. A week in, I began to bleed. But then I couldn’t stop.
13.
I gained almost 20 kg of weight over two years while on antidepressants. Yes, I was cruel to my body. I had my go at counting calories, at starving myself. When the bleeding started, and then wouldn’t stop, my first thought was, At least maybe I’ll finally start to lose some of that Lexapro weight.
14.
I found a similar sentiment in a New Yorker article where the author’s higher-than-normal levels of free testosterone resulted in an adolescence of persistent acne. At the end of college, writes SC Cornell, I finally got on Accutane, which left me with a toxified liver and – for two glorious years – the skin of a baby. Chronic bleeding; a toxifed liver; perhaps these things, too, could be glorious.
15.
The cartoonish irony is, once I started bleeding, I lost my lifelong ability to cry. The suicidal ideation returned. I found myself on hold for the Beyond Blue lifeline. I had been bleeding heavily non-stop for 34 days. I couldn’t shed a tear.
16.
Vasovagal syncope is the most common cause of fainting at the sight of your own blood. The response causes your blood pressure to drop suddenly and your heart rate to slow. The reduced blood flow to your brain can cause brief loss of consciousness. Of course, the vasovagal syncope reflex had an evolutionary advantage for early humans facing inescapable predators and bloody injuries. The body fainting was a way of playing dead; a last resort for self-defence. The heart pumping at a slower rate allowed the body to minimise blood loss from an open wound.
17.
Fainting spells broke out across Germany in the 1840s when composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt would perform. The term coined for this phenomenon, ‘Lisztomania,’ at the time carried with it serious medical concern. The term ‘mania’ in the 1840s wasn’t used flippantly; Lisztomania was considered by some to be a contagious medical condition, a new ‘female disease’ bordering on insanity for which some critics recommended public immunisation.
18.
Perhaps my body was fawning over its own dazzle of red. Perhaps my body, fearing the worst, wanted to keep all my blood for itself. Perhaps it was simply continuing in its astounding effort to live.
19.
I bled heavily non-stop for 45 days.
20.
It has been six months since I last cried.
21.
Once I saw a single drop of blood in a public bathroom stall, slightly off-centred to the right of where the white ceramic met the floor. There was something almost intentional and gorgeous about it, like Marilyn Monroe’s mole.
22.
It occurs to me that the way I experience much of the rest of my life will be inextricably mapped around my body’s menstruation. A person’s menstrual cycle affects every aspect of being, with significant consequences for mood and symptoms of pain that can often be devastating.
23.
I have no choice. My body is made of enormous forces I can’t rein in; surging rivers of blood that would jet rather impressively into the air if the right arteries were cut.
24.
The blood that seeps through the mask is perhaps an attempt at speech. When you are desperate you snatch what little power you can. Though you have to be the right kind of bleeder if you want to be heard. The rules? Blood spilt by a man means bravery; blood spilt by all else means shame.
25.
Women in the Renaissance were referred to as ‘leaky vessels’ because they were perceived to have no control over the blood, tears, milk and amniotic fluid that left their bodies.
26.
But the final rule is this: anyone’s name writ in blood disappears as soon as in water. We succumb to our bodies as we do natural disasters. You can’t expect the waves from a tsunami to remember your name, can you?
27.
What can I do but be in awe? What is the difference between a sheer cliff face and an enormous crevasse of pain in your body that could split at any moment? The abnormal growths hidden in the dark wet that could be either a grassy hill or an active volcano?
28.
I have no choice. I make room for my body. I weather its rhythms. I live; I live; I live.
29.
In the red I see a torn-apart arm in the jaws of a lion, the joint at the elbow barely clinging on, the blood at the wound clotting and welding like plums. In the red I see the lining of a uterus, mothbitten, mouldering, like a love letter singed in fire.
30.
In the red I see corseted Victorian women fainting beside grand pianos. Perhaps I am one of them, housing a vampiric, cannibalistic, Lisztomanic adoration for my own blood. My difficult veins guard their secrets jealously. My selfish heart hoards what it can. Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. I suck on my cut thumb. I call it self-love. ▼
Image: Cassie Josh - Unsplash
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