When I was a freshman in college and I came home for winter break, my brother tried killing himself by slitting his wrists in our basement. He was really fucked up on drugs and more so "hacked" at his wrists so there was a lot of blood pooling around him. My family had to carry him and drive him to the hospital because we didn't think an ambulance would be fast enough. I was in the backseat with him and holding his arms in the air and squeezing his wrists in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Doing so caused a lot of his blood to drip down my arms and on to my face.

Thankfully we got him to the hospital in time and he survived. But it was such a traumatic experience and I didn't know how to cope. When we got home at 3 am after we were told he was going to live, everyone else went to bed and I stayed up mopping up the trail of blood throughout the house and wiping down the bloody car seat and pour hydrogen peroxide on the basement carpet to get the stain of his blood out. Nobody talked about that night and I just went back to school. For several months, I ended up having horrible nightmares and having flashes of seeing blood on my hands and I felt like I was having a mental breakdown.

I came home that summer and my family's AC unit broke, so it was unbearable hot in the house. One night, I decided to sleep in the basement because it was much cooler down there, even though I hadn't gone down there since that night. I grabbed a pink blanket and pillow from my bedoom and slept down there on the couch, just a few feet from where my brother almost died.

I woke up the next morning and went up the basement stairs into the kitchen. While I was making breakfast, my dad and brother came down, chatted with me, and then they left the house. The only entrance into the basement is in the kitchen and I was in the kitchen the whole time and I saw nobody go down into the basement. A few hours later, I decided to take a nap and went back into the basement. As I was picking up my blanket on the couch, I saw a big, dark red stain on it. I was pretty confused because I just washed this blanket the night before I slept with it. I felt the stain and saw red liquid that looked suspiciously like blood on my hand. I threw the blanket down. ran up the basement stairs, locked the basement door, and hid under the covers in my room.

An hour later, my mom came into my room and said that she went down into the basement looking for me because she knew I slept there last night and saw the blanket. She asked me if I got my period because the blanket was all bloody and I was gross not to clean it up so she put it in the washer already. I was surprised to hear say it was blood because I sincerely thought I was hallucinating the whole thing. I had to tell her I didn't get period, but she didn't believe it at first because she was unsure where the blood came from. I told I didn't get my period nor was I cut anywhere. She asked if my dad or brother was injured and went into the basement and I told her that I saw them this morning and they weren't hurt and they didn't go into the basement. She whispered "then who's blood was it?" and we stared at each other in silence for a few minutes before she walked out of the room. She refuses to talk about it to this day.