manic

hypomania:

when it feels good: The swing seems to begin with disrupted sleep — or is it the other way around? When I was 21 I stayed up long nights after long nights, and spent days enmeshed in grand ideas while scorning the idea of rest.

I feel a pleasurable amount of energy or sense of wired irritability, the sense that someone has taped my eyes open and given me an injection to keep me awake—a ridiculous display of hyperactivity. My body simply can’t stop. Things seem clear, profound, dramatic.

Restless but focused, capable, clearheaded and smiling, despite having slept less than 10 hours the last four days combined. When I wake up I feel briefly miserable but it passes in moments. I snap at my mom when she asks if I’m “having an episode”. No, I say, I am not. Coffee makes me euphoric. I am not out of control. To the contrary, I am perfectly in control: a beautifully-functioning human being, much more talkative than most but not engaging in anything overtly dangerous.

I find myself hilarious. I form witty dialogues in my head and use them aloud, making everyone me laugh; their appreciation washes me in a beautiful sense of well-being.

I always feel witty, more attractive than I actually am. Aches and pains vanish. There is so much going on around me and the world seems profoundly beautiful, much mores than it ever has before. My body feels as if it’s buzzing with pleasure. I have the perfect amount of energy; I am awake, present, and euphoric. Everything makes me laugh and I have to comment on it all. I seek out customers at work almost as if I’m being pressured to do so. I have so many ideas; I am constantly planning things out in my head and carry them around with me, desperately, all day until I can tell a parent or a friend, because the concept seems vitally important for some strange intangible reason. I do not need to eat, or to sleep; hunger is an afterthought or disappears altogether. and I keep thinking about Alaska. Alaska, Alaska, Alaska. Life is full of an unseen beauty.

when it feels bad: I am irritable, uncomfortable in my own skin, wide awake and fully aware of everything that is going on around me. within me there is a certain thread of distress, although I don’t know where it’s coming from. I am impressed that i’ve been awake for the extent of time that I have and/or I try and fall asleep and wake up after less than a half hour, my body coursing with energy or my heart pounding. When I’m not irritable I make plans, particularly volunteering ones. I cry over videos of abused animals. I have ridiculous ideas, like that I’m going to go to Alaska, and am searching for tickets because it seems like a GREAT idea. I have a restless energy but no pleasurable sense of elation. I do talk—a LOT. and I talk over people. my thoughts come hard and fast and they feel more important than everyone else’s. I decide to change my major to biology (what the hell was I thinking?). When I lay down and close my eyes after hours upon hours of consciousness I know that there is no point. my insomnia is past insomnia: something has plunged my whole self into wakefulness. I jump back up, go back onto the computer and search for plane tickets. I feel good but also worry that my brain may go out of control. when I go out with my friends I drink a good deal of vodka because I know it will make me pass out, but instead it just makes my thoughts more poignant, pressed and elusive. two, three hours of sleep and I am awake again, searching for something that i’ll never find. I do not surround myself with people—I know that my talking will drive them up the wall. I ensconce myself in a castle of my own mind. After a few days of my sleep having vanished entirely, I feel vaguely like a prisoner.

true mania:

What was before a sense of pleasure, sureness and occasional euphoria has morphed into utter rapture.

Words can’t describe it: boundlessness, expansiveness, fullness. I am sublime. I realize I feel differently as I walk from the break room back to work—everything around me is so bright that it’s painful and I feel like the world is light as air. I feel as if I have wings; I am propelled, thrumming with energy and a euphoria beyond euphoria. It is at last ten times the sense of elation I had when I was given Dilaudid in the hospital. it is beyond that and more.

I instantly feel pity for those who have to shoot up amphetamines to feel like this—and at one point I almost feeling like crying, as if I’m touching dimensions that were previously hidden from me. Around me the world unfolds with a painless precision. I find that my previously shortened attention rate is almost gone; I flicker from thing to thing, aimless, but unable to stop the compulsion.

I have an uncomfortable amount of energy within me now. It causes me physical pain to stand still for longer than a few seconds. When a coworker comes to talk to me, I get the impression that she believes I’m on cocaine. I begin to talk too fast, to laugh too much—I can only realize this looking back. People begin to look at me strangely and ask me to repeat things. They can’t keep up with the perfect stream of my mind.

Self-confidence is through the roof—actually, I am beyond self-confidence, as I am beyond everything else. people are miniscule, unimportant. I’m sure they are perfectly nice people, but they don’t matter right now. who cares what they think? I smile so fully at them because I have a secret that they don’t. I am touching something they will never get to touch. I try to explain these feelings to people that do matter, but they just give me looks of alarm. I probably sound crazy.

The world is cartwheeling, carouseling around me. The walls breathe. My senses are heightened to utter exactness. I can hear everything—a whisper off in a corner, a laugh to my right. I am one with nature, with everything. I feel everything, see everything, hear everything.

I drift, I waltz, I float... who knows? All I know is that I’m touching something previously untouchable, reached some unforeseen height. My thoughts are slippery, here one moment and gone the next, mere fragments. my life has a greater purpose than I thought. I can do anything; absolutely anything. I realize that if someone told me to jump off of a building because I could fly, I would do it.

I am driven towards others and it is almost painful. I must speak; and I DO speak, over them, interrupting them, stopping them. I must be in contact with people—I must! but they are too slow for me, and they frustrate me. When I speak they give me strange looks. But what I’m saying is making perfect sense.

Energy boundless, overflowing, in excess—words come perfectly to me at first but soon they are muddled, hurried, rushed. Thoughts are like stars. Everything makes sense; everything is connected. My brain is a perfect machine but it is getting out of control. Cannot stop moving. And yet I don’t care; I don’t acknowledge it. This is the most beautiful thing I have ever felt and will ever feel. it makes the joy of mere happiness feel muted and grey and drab. it is ecstasy, wild and pure and endless. I think that even true love pales before this feeling—this “feeling”, whatever it is. All I know is that I hold the world in my hand, and I don’t want to let go.

summerland

You always loved summer and I never did. I loved winter, the arboreal chill and flakes of snow like sugar melting in your dark hair, my breath like smoke in the air. You never understood. You always asked, “Did something happen, to make you hate the heat?” It was never the heat but everything that accompanies it: the pull of bodies towards one another at night, the peeling of sunburned skin like dragonfly wings on thin bare shoulders and the cough of car exhaust down roads dusted with jasmine and perennials. Summer was like a story I wanted so badly to tell but couldn’t quite remember.

I drift down these memories like rungs on a ladder. One skip and I’ll fall. I worry that I’m losing them, that if they cease to exist then it means you never did. By now you’ve vanished almost entirely, and I can’t remember your voice but I can, almost, remember your laugh - it tickles my memory with the agonizing brutality of anything one can’t quite recall. 

I collect songs that I know you would have loved. The first time I heard ‘Chinese Satellite’ I nearly had to pull off the road; it was the line that went ‘But you know I’d stand on the corner/Embarrassed with a picket sign/If it meant/I’d see you when I die.’ It hits you like this, in waves - years gone, lifetimes spent, and you’re still in the same place, because grief doesn’t walk a straight line. These paths recede upon themselves, again and again, and in the moments I’m closest to you they cut painlessly like the incision of the sharpest knife. You’ve become adrift, though, someone I write about instead of someone I know. 

Now I read books about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, sisters and brothers. Family. And then I acknowledge that as much as I read, and as much as I write, nothing will tip back the scales, restore me to blamelessness. This is the albatross around my neck - a very beautiful phrase for a very hideous thing.

So I try and fit your memories into my head and your kindness into my hands and your words into my mouth. It’s not always easy, especially the last; I’ve always liked to try to make hideous things beautiful and you always thought it was so strangely sad. But still, I drove through the Michigan summer towns last month and felt like you were there. I think that time moves more slowly in smaller places. Those little northern villages all seem like snapshots from a dying world: black tire swings by the water, arrow-winged birds swooping over currents of power lines and the sort of houses that look as if they’ve always been empty. Sometimes twin hawks wheel through the settling sky and it’s almost like catching sight of some beautiful vacationer flashing by in a car, hair streaming and face set vividly in profile — the sudden bolt to your heart, the knowledge that you will never have what was never meant to be yours.

I’m bad with faces and worse with names, but I could drive those roads in my sleep. Destinations are more familiar to me than people. The paths are inevitable, like those you walk in a dream; somehow, I always end up where I need to be. 

So no, summer was never my season, but it was yours, and that means more to me than I could ever say. My dreams of you are no longer nightmares of loss. Coasting through the midday heat, the beach to my right and the dusky forest to my left, I thought that I could almost breathe again. It was the feeling of returning, not to one’s home but to oneself. I’ll never love it, but I see why you did, and somehow that’s enough.

the killing floor

The past does not stay where it belongs. The past comes back in shudders and starts, in phantom limbs and ghost memories and night terrors, in tension wound up the spine and through the tendons. The past lives in darkness, in the helplessness of bad dreams, in the buzz saw air of autumn and the lurid dusk of a too-warm summer. The past is morgue and killing floor, butcher shop and final resting place, and I’m gripping these pliers in my hands because at this point I’ve grown so fucking sick of yanking your teeth.

The problem with you is that you wouldn’t recognize love if it stood on your step dressed in geraldine and crimson, trailing seaflowers and sand and shadow. You wouldn’t recognize love if it knocked on your door wearing someone else’s clothes, covered in someone else’s blood, cradling someone else’s knife.

Tired of ravaging myself for you. Tired of swallowing the dull ache of resentment when I see you and your happiness, your domestic bliss, when once it was my hand you held and my cheek you kissed. There’s something the color of rust under my nails and grit on my tongue and I haven’t washed my hair in three days; I imagine you, then, perfectly coiffed, the long light hair to the wings of your shoulders and your white hands, white flowers, white home. Your harp-shaped back through the thin blouses you wear, and the graceful sweep of your freckled arms. You always stood so straight, like Audrey Hepburn, and your smile was Monroe’s.

Sometimes I’ll drink three fingers of whiskey in Grosse Pointe’s humid cage, tip my chin up to the sky and see nothing at all. They say that you can get whatever you want if only you are willing to pay the price, and I paid yours; where, then, is the tollbooth, the easy slip into another road, another life?

“Sorry about this,” I told you, (because this was, of course, the beginning of my incessant apologies to those around me), “Sorry for loving you, God I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’d have loved anyone else. I tried, I tried, I tried, and I wasn’t strong enough.” The boil of tears in my throat. I wasn’t strong enough.

I have dreams like this: a deer hanging from a gambrel, your exhalation like snow in the frigid air, the rifle still loaded by the cabin door. I’m on the table with the knives, and when your small hand lifts one to the moon  it fractures the shards of light entirely. Of course I thought I was the hunter, the stalker, vulpine and sharp-toothed and dark. And I thought that right until you drew near with the fixed blade in your small white hand and pressed it to my throat -- how the blood left me first at a stumble and then at a gallop, devil-black and hot as sin. I thought I was the hunter right until the moment you slit my neck. And maybe that’s love, or maybe it’s something like it -- or maybe it’s merely the closest I’ve ever come and ever will.

"absolute terror and absolute excitement"

It always spun me one of two ways: towards grandiose delusion or bone-deep fear, as I scrabbled desperately for a hold on the ledge of reality. I didn't realize it could happen to anyone; I didn't realize that, though severe and debilitating, it is terribly common; I didn't realize that the pills I thought were literal poison (did my doctor hate me? was there a well-laid conspiracy beneath every step I took, a pattern in every groove?) would save me. Misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, watching people's expressions morph terrifyingly before my eyes, I lost years of my life that I will never get back.

Sometimes it was almost marvelous; I thought I was on the edge of transcendence, literally delirious with excitement, repeating revelations under my breath until they lost their meaning entirely. At the time, I thought it was a symptom of my flair for dramatics, that I was coming close to some truth incomprehensible to those around me. Deluded with the notion that I was somehow special instead of a poorly-functioning psychotic (which is nowhere near as glamorous), I slipped in and out of awareness until I lost it altogether.

It can happen to anyone, and if it happens to you, you will likely resist every ounce of help offered to you. I did.

In a white room with white walls and a white bed, empty and charmless, I curled over myself and listened to the sounds of the woman across the hall. "They're talking about me again," she was telling the nurse. "These men on the news. They're always talking to me, and I try not to listen." Suffused with cold dread, I said nothing of my fears when the RN came to me -- because I'd been thinking the same thing.

I'm not blameless at all; I self-medicated myself until I slipped into the same terror that I was trying to avoid. Instead of taking antipsychotics with any sort of consistency, I relied solely on anti-anxiety agents, took downers to quell the fear. You will never meet anyone so sure of themselves as someone who is floridly delusional; they don't need help -- you just don't see the truth -- are you fucking stupid for not understanding everything that they do? It's all so obvious. The patterns (there are always, always patterns) are evident if you'd let the scales fall from your eyes. Just because it's impossible doesn't mean it isn't true.

But there's a truth beyond the transcendence of everything the paranoid patient ardently believes. Antipsychotics aren't just medications for the hopelessly ill, for the violent or "insane," or for those who will never get better. They're prescribed for depression, for personality disorders, for anxiety. And they cut through the delusional "clarity" of psychosis like a knife: even if residual fear and paranoia remain, you'll likely still be far better off.

We need to destigmatize the administration of antipsychotics, because while in some cases they're over-prescribed, they also frequently save lives. I still can't describe the unbearable feeling of lightness in my chest when the cold dread finally seeped away, and I remembered what happiness was. It felt as if I was inhaling the first clear breath I'd taken for years. I don't think I'll ever forget the strange sensation: like I was coming back to life, and that I was getting a second chance that so many unfortunately don't.

the shadows will never find you

Sometimes I think about what it would have been like if we’d known one another as kids, bruise-kneed and bloody-knuckled, lapping at our charred fingers as we held them too close to the fire. The vigor of summer underneath our feet, slanted green light in our eyes; swinging skinny knees over the docks to vanish into the water, slick as eels. And the strangest part of all is that sometimes it does seem real; sometimes it does feel as if I’ve known you all this time, in another place, maybe, another world.

And in that world, maybe none of the bad things would have happened. Maybe I wouldn’t have done things I couldn’t take back. Maybe I wouldn’t have fallen in love with all of the wrong people. Maybe you’d be happier, maybe I’d be less anxious, less wary. Maybe we wouldn’t fly so deliriously high. Maybe we wouldn’t be addicted to the glow of a bottle, that heavy head tilt back when you know you’ve hit the sweet spot, when you know that for that single moment, you’re okay.

You’re gonna be okay.

And – here is where my heart tightens – maybe in another world, you wouldn’t have lost your dad, and I wouldn’t have lost my mom.

Maybe you understand me better than I understand myself; maybe the inverse is also true, and maybe that’s why we speak in code, all the little things we grasp about one another without the benefit of words. Maybe it’s why, to me, you have never been less than beautiful. So many miles between us and absolutely none between our hearts. And god, it’s so fucking cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason – because at their core there’s often a ring of truth.

There are so many things I want. I want to kiss your cheek and hug you so tight you squeak and try to pull away; I want to bring you to the lakeshore, so we can dip our ankles in the water against the backdrop of the archaic mansions; I want to take you downtown with our stupid hats and our stupid t-shirts, sitting in a dive bar with three hundred pound men and play darts and drinking games until we’re kicked out onto the empty Detroit streets.

All of my greatest love stories have been with the friends I couldn’t bear to leave behind.

In some ways, you are my salvation from the mundane, from the dregs of depression, from the paranoia, from the false promises spoken on honest tongues – “You’ll be okay, I’ll never leave you, you’ll be okay, I don’t care what happens, I will always love you. Always, always, always. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. I am here.”

Because when you say it, I believe it.

I see things in you, beneath that crown of snow-white hair. Your head is bloody but unbowed; your eyes look towards the sky.

It honestly amazes me, how you’re always looking towards the sky.

I don’t ever want you to look down again.

if I can only say one thing,

it will have to be this.

I remember the first day we met; and that’s strange, because I can’t say that about anyone but you. You, with your leg warmers and flats and anxious smile in the middle of math class, turning to slip me a note with your palm faced-down, giant green eyes flashing with mischief, like you wanted so badly to know me — or like you already did.

We aren’t defined by what we keep with us, but by what we leave behind. 

The moon is brilliant on the lake tonight, and the water is like glass, and the wind has an atmospheric chill. Everywhere around me, the world is decaying, but fall to me has always been that season of beginning, of rebirth. And purely by luck (or not), it’s also the season I began to fall in love with you.

‘Fall in love with you.’ Most people don’t understand that, and it frustrates me, because any half-decent friendship is its own kind of love story, its own romance. The initial courting, the exhilaration, the involuntary bursts of laughter, hidden jokes, hidden smiles. I told you everything I’d ever done; you told me everything you’d ever wanted. And, I think, we loved each other all the more — it was that rare kinship, like we’d met elsewhere, in this world or the one before. 

I want to describe our friendship in words, but words can only do so much; they’re the ache, the anticipation, everything around it but the promise itself. 

It’s the air after rain, the stillness after a storm; me, curled up on your bed and you on the floor, coaxing me back into gentleness, reassuring me, yes, it’s okay, you can love who you love, we all love who we love and there’s no shame in it. My heavy eyelids flickering up and my hazel gaze, light and illuminated, catching yours: your friendship purer than what I thought I felt for her, or for him, or for her. We love who we love. Do you know how many times I’ve thought back to those nights sleeping in bed with your cats, watching horror movies until we could sleep no longer?

Maybe you do.

Language is a struggle, something that can’t express all that you hope to convey. They say love is sex, love is lust, but for me — it’s always been my closest friends and me, curled up in bedsheets, shielding ourselves from the oncoming rain. Nothing will ever kill the way I care for you.

The light will rise soon, and everything is coming up green. The world might change, but I can promise you this: nothing between us ever will.

between waking and dreaming

Yes, I am a lover, and yes, I am a dreamer,

but everything inside of me is heavy, and I know now that you can be more than one type of person at once. The girl who jumps off the bridge and remembers halfway down that everything she fears is fixable. The woman who has woken up at 6 AM every dawning morning, for the last thirty years. The man who lost his wife, burned the photos and now can’t remember her face. Everyone, because everyone has lost someone behind, and everyone has made someone cry, and everyone has failed to apologize for something because pride is the only guarantee we have.

I play games. 11:11, 1:23, 3:33. Take your pick. I make wishes on everything, eyelashes, flowers, shooting stars. It’s not because it’s endearing, an adorable girlish quirk I should have long outgrown. It’s because I am not sure I remember how to pray, and wishes were always so much easier. I sit still and hold my breath. If I make it to a certain time, that means I am safe. If I can walk the floorboards without creaking, that means you do not hate me. And if my life is aesthetically well-aligned that means, maybe, someday soon, i will be able to go.

Because that spot in the mountains was the only place I ever felt at home, lonely in the town shadowed by the gaping cliffs, where humans once dug into the rock and where I could sleep. No city’s ever made me feel like that. No city’s ever made me cry. We climbed deep into the mines and turned off the flashlights. It was all just weeping water and three hundred years of pure gold.

“you can’t see your hand in front of your face,” my brother said. “you have no idea where you’re going.”
i didn’t tell him that i never do.

I remember:

We went deep into the mountain where we breathed coal smoke, and when we came back up the sky was a disarming blue and we searched for gold in the river. I sat on a bench in the town in the sky and ate an ice cream cone and crossed my legs and thought that Thoreau was right, and that we are only ourselves when we’re far away, and that I would spend the rest of my life trying to recapture those moments–a hawk circling above a naked tree, a black so deep you cannot penetrate it, a thousand years of weeping water.

“In wilderness is the preservation of the world” and I was young and stupid and my heart was broken and everything meant something. Youth idealizes each sweet moment and suspends it in amber; I was no different, although I thought I was.

It is still all I want, an open sky and a house on a mountain and a pair of dogs and solace so that I can begin to try and understand the world. I am awkward and flimsy and an utter disappointment. I will vanish and it will be the kinder thing, because a part of me has always loved tragedy, and I’d rather be a ghost on the side of a desert road, thumb up, suitcase in hand, than take up space in this frozen city.

half-empty rooms

I know that I should have told you. But at this point, I also know that it’s too late. Half empty glasses stuck to vinyl countertops, my cheek against faux wood tables in dim diners, hot Michigan summers in no-where land. I close my eyes and I breathe. Bring winter, please. Bring winter before I’ve peeled myself away.

Broken hearts and broken bones hurt just the same. The force on impact would have been beautiful—a split lip, a torn heart. We have all walked this way so many times that it becomes an unbalanced cadence, the song you turn down on the radio because it’s always made you impossibly sad. The familiar ways feel tired, paths worn winding on the inside of my wrist and the road leading from your driveway. You come inside and shake the dirt from your shoes and turn the shower on steaming. You get in and you cry.

Lids are drawn against the night like shuttered windows but even light turns dark. It’s not your responsibility, the fault was all in the design, not the execution—we are meant to hurt one another, it’s why we breathe like we’re breaking. And have you wondered? You won’t ever be good enough. You weren’t made to be.

We’re all sharp edges and jutting hip bones, meant to hurt and not to fit. You won’t be enough until they say you are, and by then it will be too late to matter, just like everything else. And it’s sick, the way I skim around the beating vibrancy of your heart, trying to explain; no, it’s not right that you feel like nothing until they say you are something, but I’ve only ever seen myself through someone else’s eyes. The lies stick to my tongue. I’ve only ever needed me.

It’s quiet now, because silence is what happens when you don’t let people in too close. Until you come near and you say, We dig our own graves. And I say, I know, I know. You taught me how.

I built your walls around me

Winter is almost here, and everywhere the world is holding its breath. Ice is clinging to the branches in Detroit, and though I know this was never your season, that it was never your summer like it was mine, I would give anything to see you stumbling through the snow with the dogs, the little flakes like sugar melting in your black hair.

When you died so did I, and so nothing mattered. Until the winter thaw broke, something stirring inside of those of us who are grief-stricken and in pieces, hope growing its aching blooms in my chest. So many things to remember; so many things to try not to forget. You baking banana bread in the kitchen (and you hated cooking, you hated it) just to see me smile. You cradling my pitiful chihuahua to you and never complaining once, because he saw right through you, and you were the only one he loved. The two of us sitting in Hemingway’s favorite northern restaurant, sunset bleeding over the lake and the windows wide, the beauty of it enough to make my throat ache.

I wish I could exist without doing all the damage my living requires. I wish I could be sweeter, kinder, softer, transplant your heart inside of me. I wish I could see you one last time, not to say “I love you” — because you know I do, better than anyone — but to say “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry I wasn’t a better daughter, a better person, a better friend. Because I believe that “I’m sorry” are the two most important words in the world; and I know that I shouldn’t think that, either. But I think a lot of things that I shouldn’t.

I have protected myself for these past two years, these twenty four months, built walls around me as high as Jericho. And now, at last, they’re coming down. They’re finally coming down.