Fishing, Bleeding and Forgetting

My brother called me tonight, ordering me to go out with him and his friends for a beer, invitation I happily accepted.

We were on the very corner of my street, at a famous bar there is around here, sitting on a low wall and drinking. Right next to us, there was this guy fishing. Which is really common, fishing is really popular in this neighborhood.

Every fish the guy happened to catch we'd celebrate - not noisily, though, cause that would've been annoying. Discreetly.

Suddenly, he caught this huge horrible blowfish.

For those who do not know, the blowfish is highly poisonous, and therefore not edible. In order to eat it, you gotta cut it in a veeeeery specific way, with a special technique, and all.

We wondered whether the guy would take the blowfish home - if he had, we'd have been afraid for him: he didn't look like he had the special techinique to cut particularly poisonous fish! 

But the guy showed right away he had no interest in taking it home, and so proceeded to try and take the hook off the fish's mouth. My friends got back to talking, but I just couldn't take my eyes off the fish - it just struggled so much!

There's this line in Nirvana's song Something in the Way that goes: "It's okay to eat fish, cause they don't have any feelings."

I beg your pardon? Kurt had obviously never seen what I witnessed tonight. The pain the blowfish was in was so freaking obvious I almost cried.

Eventually, the guy managed to take the hook off, and threw the fish back in the sea - and I breathed at last.

But not for long. The struggle had left its mark on the wall: a huge puddle of blood.

Well, when I say "huge", I use the term loosely; but the puddle was more than half the fish's size. Relatively speaking, it was huge - can you imagine a puddle of your own blood that's more than half of your size? That's a lot!

And for the rest of the night, I couldn't look at anything else.
It was violently red, and impossibly thick, and it just stayed there, reminding me vaguely of chocolate fudge.

My brother was giving his usual speech about politics, and I stared at the blood; one of his friends played the guitar - beautifully, I should say - and I stared at the blood. We talked about the World Cup, while I stared at the blood the entire time. I just couldn't take my eyes off of it.

I've always had problems with blood - not mine, though. I can break or scrape any part of my body, bleed through my nose, and be fine with it. I have no problems with looking at my own blood. (Well, I AM a woman after all! If I had problems with bleeding, I'd be in for some serious therapy).

Other people's blood, however, oh, that's a whole other story! And that includes fish's blood.

The fisher guy was fine; my brother and his friends were fine; why was I the only one who cared?

I finally got upset that I was the only one who gave a damn. But I still couldn't stop thinking about the fish.

The blood will be quickly washed away with the next rain. And no one will see that someone suffered there, no one will be able to tell.

I hate the fact that everything can be easily washed away. Even suffering. As if pain were that easy to erase from one's memory.

It's silly, really, but I guess I just... sympathized with the blowfish.