Blood Ran Cold

“Her/His blood ran cold.”

It’s one of those phrases you see just before the character senses danger or hears bad news. It’s one of those things you probably don’t quantify in your head as you read, or “feel” in that way we feel so much of what we read, what we watch. It’s harder to identify with than a short, sharp shock; a little elusive.

Yet, when it happens in your life, it has such power. The roof of your mouth chills, the backs of your arms prickle – freezing, no matter where you are, no matter the weather, no matter the clothes or even the immediate protection of your surroundings. Your body shivers with a cold at odds with reality, with any stimuli available but your indomitable BRAIN, which has created its own physical circumstances from within.

With so many of the people I love most in the world half its circumference away from me, it happens, often, in the silent comfort of my own house, my own couch. I can be sitting, nestled with the warmest Editor Cat in existence, or eating hot food, or wrapped in my thick house-sweater that isn’t even fit for public use anymore … and some stray email changes the climate for me, inverts the relativity of Diane-the-Living-Space-Heater and suddenly I’m a lump of metal, endothermic properties abolished, icy as a Zhivago winter, every molecule stilled – and yet fingers still shaking, the whole of myself brittle and waiting only to be toppled, to crumble into the dust of frost, like that scraped off a January windshield.

The symptom that always fixates my attention is the roof of my mouth going cold, which is why “blood runs cold” seems such a weak description of the moment. It’s the bones going cold; the head, felt more immediately than the heart – tongue numb with it – eyes, even, suddenly refrigerated – the wary pucker of a certain nether muscle, suddenly aching with pressure. That other alarm reaction, where the body seems to want to expel all its contents, too urgently.

When even the saliva in your mouth feels freezing, “blood runs cold” loses its accuracy …

More even than heartbeat-thumping, or “seeing red” (one of those descriptions I have never been able to make sense of; it describes no physical response I can even approximate to emotional experience), or the sudden mental detachment of danger or rage, “blood runs cold” seems the bone-deep emotional action, the sub-mental expression of what makes humans animal.

***

Not long ago, some news outlet or other spread the news that human beings experience cold-sympathy: when we see images or read/hear descriptions of people in frigid conditions, we feel it ourselves – to the extent that, Some Study Shows, our actual body temperatures drop.

Interestingly, this is not replicated with warm temperatures. Perhaps “sympathy” in any of its senses is just not raise-able for those on pretty beaches. But, if we see another person in an icy blast, we experience it ourselves, with them.

Growing up, we used to get a smile at my mom when she said she got cold watching the very movie I invoked above, Dr. Zhivago.

Image: Getty

Yet we also did understand what she meant. I know I’ve felt that way, that physical participation in something I’m not supposed to be part of. Other Some Studies have Shown that we experience entertainment in a pretty holistically “identified” way, at one with a main character.

(One worries, momentarily, about what that might mean for the *author* of a work about an ax-wielding barbarian. Then stops.)

***

For my writer pals I’ve coaxed into commenting here sometimes (and for ANYONE with a word to say!) what sympathetic states of being have you worked on recreating … or speculating about … in a work of yours (Donnaeverheart, I expect you’ve got some thoughts!)?

Or what writerly descriptions leave you, ahem, cold in terms of what they actually say to you as a reader? (I’ve always had a hard time with “She looked at him through her lashes” myself).

Or, for some real fun: what makes your blood run cold?