forgotmynotebook

A Nonlinear Narrative

The blood that flows through this throbbing, writing hand had, then, ceased to flow. Accompanying the ceased circulation, all coherent thoughts congealed.   

“Are you donating blood?” I ask. 

“No. Are you?” a friend replies.
“Yes.”

“Why? Is this like a karma thing?” 

“No, I just always wanted to, and I promised I would.” Or, at least, that is the answer I give. Perhaps there is an inherent fallacy in finding joy in giving, in giving without any expectation for something in return. 

At 8:46, another winter weekend night, my mama flipped through the paper and found an unsuspecting advertisement- a blood donation drive. The advertisement requested O-negative or A-negative donors in good health. With a landline phone, my mama left a voicemail for the center in New York. A perpetual and unplaced wonder for my mama’s actions has followed from that phone call, so ungrounded and peculiar this curiosity. 

“How old are you?” 

“Seventeen.” 

After a whirlwind of forms and medical questioning, the needle bound to draw my blood glimmers in the blunt light of the gymnasium. 

As spring’s first bud bloomed, she did not come home at her usual 4:15. She yelled my name at 6:00. She had dinner in her hands and a beige bandage embracing a gash of sacrifice and generosity.  

My brother asked, “What was it like?”

My mama replied, half in Hindi, “Well, they test your blood and then draw it with a needle.”

“Who’s going to get it?”

“He’s young, a kid in New York, he’s seventeen.”

After the needle pierces, the bag fills with blood, my thoughts, which often can not cease rushing, stagnate. 

There are too many odd Saturday nights of childhood that one cannot recall, unless a night had an unexplained idiosyncrasy. Rarely would my mama wear something with a shine, forget a glittering obsidian top draped across her shoulders, which glowed through the drab kitchen kitchen lights of New Jersey suburbia. She clarified the momentous occasion for this attire, “All the donors are going to dinner with the kid.  It’s in New York, so I’ll be back late.” 

What a remarkable exchange! A dinner for a life saved! 

A tinge of purple and grey overcast my right arm and the bag collects only a few more drops of my A-positive blood. The nurse moves the cord, and asks, “How are you?”

“I can’t feel my arm. Is that normal?”

“Do you want me to stop?”
“Yes.”

Disgustingly bittersweet autumn wind shook the final leaves off their branches. The 4:15 routine cut by one Thursday arrival at 9:45. All black, no glitter, but a sparkle lived on through the glistening tears down her nose. 

“Today I went to the boy’s funeral.” 

Why did I stop when I possibly could have continued, I suppose either way my motivations would be selfish. To stop, no one would receive blood. To continue, I would take personal pleasure in giving, a karmic sin.

The nurse detaches the needle and the bag and the hollow tubing. Two drops of blood spill on the wooden floor and finally some thoughts resume to flow: my mama’s blood had not an ounce of selfishness. 

Due to that initial phone call, the crimson drops on the floor and what flows through my veins, I receive reflections, Proustian in nature, but Socratic in reality. Quotidian walks from the same few academic buildings to the dorm displace the once still evenings of childhood, and bring forth conversation, reflections and journal entries that I sometimes doubt the value of. Regardless, the evenings of years ago and today have the same dharma for me. 

A decade, and what has changed? 

“I’m so upset about the donation.”

“What happened?”

“Well, my blood stopped flowing.”

“That’s fine, at least you tried.”

“I couldn’t even donate, and my mom, she saved a kid’s life. He was my age.”

“Was?”

“He passed not too long after the donation.”

“So, her donation also sort of failed.”

“I guess you’re right.”

A decade after a phone call, through futile philanthropy of blood and evenings spent meandering from buildings to pages… At last, some light shed on the tautological situation I call my bildungsroman. 

At least my thoughts continue. At least I could not donate a drop of selfish blood.