“If it bleeds, it leads” has been the creed of print media since the 1890s. Print media is dying. So is media literacy. So are we. And we’re doing nothing to stem the tide: no styptic powder to stick on the wound, no tourniquet to dam the flood. Instead, we’re teaching our children to swim in oceans of blood, transporting iron brine into backyard pools so they can splash in the shallows of the O-negative truth that filming their drowning is of greater value than their rescue.

The wealthy buy their kids water wings and swimming lessons, but nothing can lessen the sting of heartstrings snapping from rusting once plucked, exposed to the elements too much, too young. One stroll of a scroll through social media and a preteen can see infants in Gaza dissolve into dust, the 13 reasons a classmate has given up, and all the fame the pain brings. If they’re willing to bleed on screen, they can get their needs met. The attention economy, a bloodborne pathogen.

The children who manage to survive the illness grow into adults who cannot tell the difference between blood-bubble baths and baptism: sinking beneath the viscous surface and wanting to die, only raised to walk in the newness of life if someone notices we’ve near-exsanguinated. How else did you think we filled the tub? Survival without notoriety isn’t enough – it’s the bath salt in our ever-open wounds. We’ll let it fester before ever admitting the truth that what we are is afraid to be forgotten. We can’t scare the rotten boogeyman away, so we play bloody bedtime stories steeped in the truth of crime to regulate our nervous nervous systems. The victims aren’t who we remember, we remember best the perpetrators. We all end up dead sooner or later – better to be our end’s narrator than to die in obscurity.

But what if I refuse to bleed for you – to unpick the stitches of my sorrows? Will you still be here tomorrow if I refuse to be the steak on your plate served rare? If you cannot whet the appetite of your knife on my delicate insides? If I will not fillet my heart’s flesh and lay it bare? I do not care what the prophets say – no profit is worth the day to day stink of complicity in my own mutilation. I will not mine my bruises for their disappearing ink. Forgive me if I refuse to feed the vultures – if the Pulitzer prize you’ll receive for the photograph of my sun-bleached bones is not worth the price of the way my entrails trail from the casket of my body. Some things are not for sale. Some things are holy. And I am wholly mine. I am no one’s sacrifice. Despite what the ravens say. “Nevermore” will I present myself to the scavengers. Pray for the cannibal birds of prey: blood washes nothing clean.