Blood?

It is Tuesday, February 20th. I wake up around noon, one o'clock. Twelve or thirteen hours of sleep and I'm still exhausted. I don't care that I've missed both of my classes for the day. One of them had been earlier in the morning, ten o'clock or so, while the other started at noon. I should've at least made it to my second class, but a steady fatigue is beginning to set into my body. I keep telling myself that it's just a bad cold. I mean, the start of a bad cold.

I'm lying in bed, warm and comfortable, not quite ready to get up. Where is the harm in sleeping for a couple more hours? Volleyball practice isn't until later in the afternoon. It is tempting, but I force myself to throw back my comforter, wipe the sleep out of my eyes, shuffle over to the sink.

Cold water. Cold washcloth.Toothbrush, toothpaste. Swish. Spit. Blood.

Blood?

Another spit and this time it is all blood, no toothpaste. I pull up the front of my lip and squint into the mirror. Blood is rolling out of my gums, over my top teeth. I do not put two and two together. There is no immediate association between the gums and the bruising. It does not occur to me that there might be a relationship.

My glums bleed all day. They bleed while I eat a late lunch at the JCR. I try to drink plenty of fluids. You are supposed to do that when you are sick. It also keeps the blood from staining my teeth. At some point in the early evening as the JCR begins to fill for pool and darts and beers, I remember to check my leg for bruising. I sneak off to the bathroom so I can spit more blood into the sink. I sit in one of the stalls and nervously pull down my jeans. The light kind of sucks in the stalls, flickering flourescents. I'm squinting as I carefully check my right leg.

There is nothing. The other bruises I'd written about are still spotted around my legs and feet, but nothing has formed where I'd punched my thigh.

Good. Very, very good.