Healer

An excerpt from the new book/film, "Healer", by Bill and Britain
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I know blood. I know its smell, its taste, its consistency. The way blood thickens when exposed to air and time. The way its shiny wet red turns to dull dry brown. The way it moves like water when it’s thin, and the warmth it maintains as it flows from within your skin to carve a pattern upon your face, your brow, your back, your hand. I love watching people’s reaction to the sight of blood. That’s intoxicating for me and I find myself left with an often inappropriate uncontrollable grin that I’ll try to erase quickly. Horror, surprise, sympathy, and the ever present cringe. Everyone’s cringe is unique. For some their cringe is out and out nausea. For the tough it’s a barely wrinkled crows foot in one eye. Some people cross their arms covering their elbows. Some find a place to sit clutching their legs behind the knees. Some just cover their faces leaving small parts between their fingers because they just can’t look away. I think it’s because watching the reality of what’s happening is actually better than the horror they imagine when they close their eyes. That’s why the people who can actually turn away and feel better about what they can’t see may be the pure in heart, or at least mind. When the horror of reality is more tame than the mind’s capacity to conjure imaginary gore, you may need a therapist.

Some reactions have a soundtrack. It may sound like a nervous laugh, a hiss as air is sucked through clenched teeth, or an expletive that both cuts and enhances the tension. It’s cut because it articulates what everyone’s thinking when they see the person before them become a leaking biohazard who is not to be envied. It’s enhanced because, depending on the expletive, a degree of seriousness has now been implied to the situation. It’s the screaming reaction that I can’t handle. That and a crying child. I hate the thought that a child may witness something in this moment that marks their psyche for life, rendering them speechless and incoherent for the duration of the trauma.

But personally, for me, It’s all about the pain. I’m not sure which is worse. The pain of a blade slicing through flesh, or the pain of an ache in your heart. No, it’s much deeper than that. The soul? Still not deep enough. Yet there’s this need, this appetite, because my pain can take away someone else’s. It’s strange how this gift turns you into a philosopher, and what is a philosopher except a person with more questions than can be answered in a thousand lifetimes? And I have questions. Lots of them.