Those Bloody Loopholes!

Often writers close loopholes in stories, leaving the reader clear about the message they intend for the readers to glean from the piece. In one of the early pieces, I accidentally left a bunch of dark details ambiguous. People who read it shared their different interpretations of the story which I found enjoyable. I discovered that not fixing loopholes allowed people to explore for themselves a meaning that was potentially deeper than I had intended it to be.

The piece for me was a simple mystery that was symbolic of wanting freedom from a relationship that was banal. Looking back, there was not a lot of depth in the opening which basically has a woman saying she doesn’t know if she believes in love. Shortly after that opening the focus is on blood and bleeding.

When she notices her body is covered in blood, most people thought it was her lover's or enemy's blood. I left that misunderstanding in place along with a few others. I did not explain why the narrator does not find physical injuries on herself which added to a misunderstanding. Despite not finding injuries she finds herself bleeding which was seen as guilt by the average reader. This concept of guilt was increased as she became physically weak.

Although I intended the weakness to be literal like she was unknowingly losing blood, it ended up being a question of sanity which escalated as she crawled out of the house. She is physically weak and seen as potentially insane. She is either seen as leaving the house to remove herself from guilt or from a place that is causing her insanity.

Although her lack of capability to move isn’t seen as symbolic of the relationship that is potentially suffocating, I ended up enjoying what people understood or saw instead of what I intended.

The last section of confusion that I left was her telling the boyfriend she felt better outside of the home. That his hug and his startled reaction to being covered in blood was often interrupted as his blood. The readers really explored that being in a relationship with him may have felt draining. And she was misplacing her experience to be about the home instead of him. Even in the end while she grows weak and numb in his arms trying to fix the bleeding, there are no clear resolutions for the readers. And I enjoyed the fact that people were left exploring what happened. Hearing the various ways people tried to piece it together was far more interesting than the actual story.

Mainly the ambiguity of whether she was sane or not was an interesting talking point. The blood became wrapped up in ideas of where is the issue in the relationship. It became the idea that the couple had a problem. It allowed people to explore relationship problems or issues as individual, co-created, or that everything alternates at different points of time between the two people.

In the end, what started for me as a curious exploration that a person feels trapped, drained, and dying in a relationship became a larger discussion. It allowed me to see how small changes in language can open the world of discussions and allow for even more interesting discussions than getting rid of the loopholes I created.