it’s okay to bleed
by Alina Zollfank
It feels salient to stay soft these days.
I cower in the bathtub and have the end-of-bath, perimenopausal (won’t/can’t-make-it-to-the-toilet) pee. It’s pink, then red, then little, fleshy pieces ranging from liver to strawberry flow out of me and settle, like sediment, at the bottom of the bath. When I stir, they do, a bit like an algae bloom. I’ve stopped being scared of what my body does during these wiser years, and I attempt to approach this stage with fascination. I will myself to soften and see my inflamed uterus, that lately engorges and billows like a jellyfish, as a friend, a manifestation of the universe. I learn to listen, and softly.
This late, late evening, with my two nearly grown children actually asleep in their beds, my husband snoring away the memories of the last chemo round, and the old beagle schlorp-snorting in his dreams, I can hear myself think. Let me rephrase that: I can hear my pelvis think. It thinks softer. It says it needs to be aired, oxygenated, that I should let my diaphragm relax, and connective tissue give, give, give. It wants the whispers and shouts of the planet to come on in.
During the night—submerged, of course, in sweat-disturbed dreams on an extra thick towel to absorb all that flows out of me—it occurs to me how hard the world is. With every passing day, it gets harder. I don’t just mean rising grocery prices, automated insurance denials, catastrophic climate catastrophes, the empty-eyed person on the street corner holding a tattered cardboard sign with a shaking hand. I don’t just mean the shrinking bank accounts, the news of wars in places far away but too close in our time, or the dying honey bees.
No, I mean people are turning hard. It’s a comeback disease, and it feels violently contagious. My ancestors, they went through this, and when they were old and I was young, I sensed they could never quite cure themselves of that acquired hardness. The harsh stayed in their core, a rigid rod of me-mine-must-win. I watch this happen now—to people who have forgotten, despite their self-proclaimed faith and benevolence, what compassion is. Who value photo ops over eye contact, and who curate an image of might and power and must. Whose hardness pours into the community and makes their eyes glaze over, so the official disregards the young child who has cancer, dismisses a nursing mother, disrespects a person who served in our military, disappears someone who follows the rules of the land to the letter. A world of dissing, this illness. The cop who aims at the nonverbal person with autism who is wildly stimming, but not a risk to anyone, is infected. The funder who holds sway over life and not, over research vital for survival and not, got it, too. The public relations woman who clutches not pearls but a cross to her chest definitely caught it. With her perfectly painted smile and a ready joke, she makes an über confident mockery of human lives so those who watch her start thinking, “Well, maybe this neighbor of mine really is a bad person? I’ve known them for years and they’ve always been nice, but look at her! Her eyes are so sparkly and blue, how could she lie?”
And then there is the acute stage of illness marked by hard hands, dark uniforms, masked faces. Beneath oversized sunglasses, the hardness virus has taken hold and slowly, insistently eaten away at what used to pass for a soul. What is left is a vacuum surrounded by stiff shells. Their instructions say it’s okay to whisk people away who are simply studying, reading, writing, researching, working, loving their children. If the system says so, the system is right. The system is hard, but right. Right? So at night they go home to their moms and dads, spouses and kids, Labrador retrievers. They switch into casual clothing, have a nice dinner, and celebrate a good day’s work—and they sleep oh-so-soundly.
Today’s main currencies might not be made of metal anymore, but gosh, austerity further hardens those who desire, who want more and more and more. That is what I mean by hard. It wasn’t always this way, on this scale. Humans are wired to be selfish and competitive, but that’s what religion and government and social systems are for: to counteract the selfish gene, to help everyone along through altruism, through collaboration and common good. As a society, as a species, really, we do depend on the warmth in each heart and the support and understanding we can lend each other. But those are axed words now: warmth, heart, understanding. The axing of words was the first symptom. They celebrated it out in the open, daily and loudly, celebrated the loss of anything the virus perceived as weakness. It’s worrisome that step after step, extreme after extreme, more of the people start thinking—hey, maybe I am they, too. They being the hard ones, the ones with icy light in their eyes. The ones who carry that big stick and use it liberally, discriminately.
I look down at my pelvis, which has gone quiet as my brain has gone louder, and I ponder: anyone who has birthed with love and delight, pain and power, anyone who has held a fresh baby (and I’m talking about wanted babies here) knows a compassion and responsibility so profound they could never get corrupted by this disease of heart shrinkage and soul disappearance, right? Anyone who has cradled a soft life, smelled a newborn’s head, cooed and sung, babbled along, must feel their heart soften. It’s the ultimate antidote to hardness, correct?
Wrong. I see mothers join that side, the harsh side. Whether they are acting out of fear or self-preservation, whether they’re trying to give an economic edge to their own, or they just didn’t get enough love in their childhood and are now filling that void with materialism and might, I don’t know. But the profound ugliness of this world triggers my uterus again. She passes another fist-sized clot, and I realize ibuprofen isn’t doing the trick anymore. What is there to do? Listen, just listen.
Later, I towel off yet again, wrap myself up, and venture out. I am nurturing the soft part of me (thank you, Mary Oliver) so much that when I inadvertently step on a cocoa-and-sun-swirled snail in our backyard and hear the tell-tale crunch, I crumble. I sit on the old stone wall, and I wail. I apologize over and over to the busted shell on the ground and the oozing goo underneath. It’s not red but palish, soft and giving. Forgiving? I feel wholly connected to the pile of once-was at my feet. My squishy heart deliberates whether snails have souls, and if so, whether they’re soft, and whether they can remain hopeful even after their home has been bombed. Is living weakness? Is dying? Is bleeding? Is questioning? Is caring? “On some level, vanishing softness leaves all beings bereft,” says my uterus as it contracts yet again. Then she hums me a downy tune of forgiveness and wisdom and tells me to keep paying attention to the dainty yet valiant snail shells in our world. And to never, ever harden.
Alina Zollfrank dreams trilingually in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has won the DIAJ Award and been nominated repeatedly for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. She has more upcoming in The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Thimble, Reckon Review, and Sunlight Press. Alina is a grateful recipient of the 2024 Washington Artist Trust Grant, committed disability advocate, and hapless but hopeful gardener.