She was floating. She was upside-down. She could see the thin black lines above her, thin, criss-crossing lines of branches, outlined in white, faint gray behind. She could feel tiny dots of cold on her cheeks, softly, gradually. The brightness didn’t hurt. The pressure was fading.
She had seen an old educational film from the 1950s that compared the circulatory system to a series of pneumatic tubes, carrying vital documents from one end of a modern office building to the other. Being a child of the 1980s, she had had no idea that there had been a time when capsule pipelines were common infrastructural items in most modern cities. Being three years old, and having never seen such a thing, she misunderstood the metaphor. She thought, as a child, that the circulatory system actually worked on the same principles described in the film. She thought that blood was a gas, pressurized, flowing through tiny tubes running up and down the body, sending oxygen to all the cells.
When she was four, the headaches started. Sudden onset migraines, sometimes lasting for two days, sometimes three. The headaches brought an extreme sensitivity to light. The doctor told her parents that it was a common early warning sign for an oncoming migraine. Her preschool teacher, Mr. Abrams, kept a pair of dark glasses in his desk with a post-it note with her dad’s cell phone number. She knew that when the light started hurting, she should ask Mr. Abrams for her sunglasses. When she asked for her sunglasses, Mr. Abrams knew to call her dad to come pick her up. She never told anyone that she could tell when a headache was coming even before the fluorescent bulbs in the classroom forced her to squeeze her eyes shut. The first symptom was never light sensitivity. The first symptom was the pressure.
It was like the gaseous blood in her pneumatic circulatory system was forming clouds. She pictured a deep black cherry Kool-Aid cloud drifting up from her back, up into her neck, and thickening in the base of her head. More and more gas, more and more pressure, her head like a balloon, but like that time when they made a piñata in arts and crafts by covering a balloon with papier-mâché, the blood cloud didn’t have room to expand anymore. There was a big, fluffy cloud of blood expanding in her head, and soon the light would hurt, and soon the pressure would grow until it started causing cracks on the inside, and then there’d be pills that didn’t help, and the vomiting, and the throbbing, and applesauce with cinnamon served in bed, with the lights off and the curtains drawn.
On her fifth birthday she was learning how to ride her new bike when she fell off the curb into the street and scraped a large chunk of skin off her leg. She had never seen her own blood before, and was so confused she forgot to cry. It wasn’t whistling out of her shin like steam in a teapot. It was oozing, thick, syrupy. Her mom soaked it up with a washcloth and sprayed something on it that made it feel like she was melting in acid. She had a faint scar for years, but it faded.
When she was seven she was in the car with her mom when they visited a bank drive-thru teller, and she watched her mom put her deposit slip into a canister and slid it into a chute that made a whooshing sound. She saw the canister fly up a tube, and then saw it fall inside the bank window. Nobody, not the bank tellers nor her mother, seemed to think this was as amazing as she did. “That’s like the blood stream,” she said. “Like in that film, yes,” her mother replied. For years after, whenever her mother went to the bank without her, she would sulk in her room.
She was eight when she cut her hand. She was in the woods with a friend and he had a pocket knife and she was using it and somehow the blade folded in on her fingers. She had seen blood enough times by now not to be surprised, but it was a hard image to shake, the idea of blood as a gas. She stared at her fingers, three deep gashes across her knuckles that looked like little mouths. Flexing her fingers, the wounds opened and closed, and it looked like her fingers were breathing blood. Straighten, close, inhale, blood stops. Bend, open, exhale, blood gathers, like a bubble, until it gets too heavy, falling off the fingers, through her other hand cupped beneath, spattering the oak log they sat on.
Blood seemed so heavy to her. If she was full of blood, she felt she should be heavier, weighed down with iron and sludge. It was her secret truth she carried, that her blood only turned to liquid when it met with the air. The rest of the time, she knew, it was light. She could hear it whooshing around inside when she plugged up her ears. She could still feel the pressure building up, the blood rising to her head in a dark red cloud, just before her headaches started. Filling her head to bursting.
When she got her first period, she giggled. She never told anyone why.
She wondered what happened to the sled.
She had felt the pressure building, the cloud forming, funneling up her spine and filling her skull from back to front. She’d said “Not now, not now.” She’d left her sunglasses at home. She’d forgotten how snow reflected light back in dozens of angles, so it was like the sun was in the ground, in the trees, on the roofs and sidewalks and buried cars. She closed her eyes.
Floating. She couldn’t hear anything but the quiet sound of snow hitting snow, a gentle hiss, almost a sound by virtue of not being a sound at all. Almost sounding like a tiny leak in a balloon. Gas escaping slowly through a tiny hole. She stared up at the trees, and felt warm.