What it feels like to live with cyclothymia--to be read aloud
I know it’s here. I do not know from where it came though we have met before once. That time it cut out my heart and left me for
dead. It did not know my secret. (I do not need my heart to live.) Now I am older so I know it is here. It already flooded my world up to my
waist. It climbs quickly, silently,
disguised as other things--school, work, seasonal affective disorder. If I could just work harder, work faster--but I can't, there's smoke pouring from my brain, singing my eyebrows. I push my
hands out and feel them sink into the ooze. It carries me—suspended—there is no surface. That burn up my nostrils into my mind, down
my throat into my chest. I am there
forever. I will lose consciousness
soon. I don’t know why but I brace my
hands on my knees and begin to cry.
And then it’s gone and all I know in the end is that I've
wrestled with something primitive and primordial and I did not lose though I did not win. It’s not so impressive in
the light. We laying there, me and this
thing that is older than time itself, exhausted, bruised, bloodied, covered in
the muck and mire and shit of the night, helplessly bare in the gray morning, painfully
gulping thin air. I do not know its name
or its face—it is always changing.
We look at the handprints on each other's necks, hating each
other, but without enough strength to do anything--not even to glare--knowing
at the same time that it's the most intimate interaction we've ever had. I close my eyes to rest and then remember
it’s still there so I open them again, slowly, as if the very motion of opening
my eyelids is in itself a lover's recognition, a salute to a worthy opponent. The beast knows this, and it needs reprieve
too, so it gathers itself, like tar reverse flowing back into the abyss of my
being, taking with it every disgusting, perverse, mutated part of my
world. My face, my neck, the insides of
my ears are raw and burning from the salty delta that overflowed from inside my
skull. I am too tired to clean myself so I lay there, miserable, in the nowhere in-between state.
Sleep comes, stealing inside of me while I lay there too
weak to fight. The siren is silent. There is no one left to sound it. And sleep smiles at me, a smile that says she
loves me more than anyone else, so even though I find her repulsive (that cloying,
annoying, persistent, pathetically dull wench that I normally deflect), I close
my eyes and let her touch me. She is
second best. She will never awe and set
my mind on fire, but she is there. She
is persistent. She is consistent. She is gentle. She takes off my armor, kisses
my wounds, and feeds me numbing draft.
“Numbing draft?” I think, “Silly girl. I cannot find my feelings.” “I know,” she says, “I know.” Unthanked
wench. I owe her. More than that, I need her. I know she will keep me safe, so I let her
kiss me. I let her cover me with her
body, and as she draws her arms close around my shoulders I wrap myself in the
comforting knowledge that I am still alive and I will stay alive till the next
time we meet and make fierce battle again.
