The first time I wrote about this, I was trying to get blood out of my bra. The article is called How to Get Blood Out and at was meant to be sarcastic. Sort of. The title, at least. Because what else do you call the moment you’re standing in your bath-tub half-sobbing, trying to figure out which YouTube tutorial best explains how to remove blood stains from delicate fabric. Only then do you remember your mom’s bloodstain-removal magic.
What I didn’t say in that piece – what I’m ready to say now – is not only how but why it got there in the first place.
It was after a fight. Another one. The kind where you feel like you’ve been picked apart for so long you can’t tell where your own voice ends and his starts. The kind where everything is your fault even when nothing makes sense. Where you’re being “too sensitive,” “crazy,” “dramatic,” and “dishonest” all in one breath – but also somehow “not open enough” and “withholding love.”
That night, I hit my own arm into a window. Not to be theatrical. Just… because it was there and I needed something to give. The glass did.
It shattered. I slipped through the cracks I kept pretending weren’t there.
I had a few tiny cuts on my hand and cheek but the big one deep and clean landed on the back of my upper left arm. It bled profusely. Like horror-movie style bleeding. I ran to the bathtub and turned on the shower, not even thinking. Water, soap, blood circling the drain. I remember whispering, “I just want my Mommabear.”
I applied pressure. Betadine. Bandaged it up. Re-bandaged it. The next day, with it still bleeding, I Googled “how long should a wound bleed before going to the ER.” (Twenty minutes, in case you’re wondering. It had been 14 hours.)
But the point of this article isn’t the wound. Not really.
It’s about how sometimes life gives you the metaphor and the mess at the exact same time. And how we still try to clean it up before we ask ourselves why it happened in the first place.
Because the signs were always there. Not just that night. In the way he never apologized, only deflected. In the constant suspicion, the late-night accusations, the fact that he’d offer me love and then yank it away the second I didn’t respond the way he wanted. In the way he could turn a conversation about his actions into a therapy session about my “emotional instability.” How the emotional mess was always mine to mop up. How I believed him when he told me I was lucky he still wanted me, even when I felt like I was drowning in the relationship.
That’s the thing about staying too long in something that drains you: your body will start speaking up when your heart refuses to leave. First with tension. Then with fatigue. Then, eventually, with something you can’t ignore – like glass in your arm and blood on your bra.
And when the signs go from metaphor to literal? You don’t get to pretend anymore. The moment pain becomes physical, you’re out of time for denial.
But here’s the complicated part. The heart is stupidly loyal. Even when it knows it’s being broken. It wants to believe the good parts, the promises, the potential. It’ll excuse bruises – emotional or otherwise – if the apology is warm enough. If the love used to be real enough.
But the truth? If something causes you to break your own skin, it’s already broken you in ways you haven’t named yet.
I bandaged my arm for weeks. Long after it needed to be. Because I wasn’t just tending to the cut – I was avoiding the truth that it symbolized. That this wasn’t love, not anymore, at least. That I wasn’t safe. That I was trying to hold something together that had already shattered.
So, yes, the blood came out of my bra. The cut scabbed over. The window got replaced. But me? I’m still unlearning the kind of love that hurts you and makes you say sorry for bleeding.
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