Repeat after me, you say under your breath, it is the illness speaking, it it the illness hanging over your eyelids, the things you tell yourself today isn't the way you'll feel forever.
You start drinking at noon.
If you can't sweep the demons from your doorstep, bring them in and knock them out
instead.
For days, your spirit soars, covers the distances with featherweight strides that seem impossible in the empty depth of winter. You think perhaps you've unearthed some long-harbored secret to survival and wonder if you're too well, now, to complain.
But then the morning comes with ice picks for alarm clocks, draping boulders across your chest, no explanation, no excuse. Your health insurance company says you are fine, so they will no longer pay for your attempts at climbing out of the chasm. An airplane reels into the Potomac River, you can't remember the last thing someone said something to be happy about.
You're out of milk for your morning coffee.
There was a time when you thought if you only made it out of your 20s, you could live forever and die when it was time. Saw the impulses of youth claim people who felt like kin, counted days until you aged out of the woods.
Neglected to see how many of your ilk gave up at 31, at 47, at 62. How the woods do not belong to an age, but to a blood stream, to a temperament, to a destiny. You wanted to be one of them so badly that you forgot to read the fine print.
When you sign up for sifting through the madness,
you agree to carry the woods
for as long as your legs will hold.
When you turn around, you see mountains of words piled at every corner, see years of quips, of meandering verse, you have not been silent, only mumbling. Some years have better words than others, some years look different in hindsight, some are painful in their optimism, knowing what you know now to come after. She explains to you how what you write doesn't matter if you don't network your way into getting it out there, and you wonder if out there really holds the allure people think. We all think we are unique, but suddenly we are living through the collapse of an empire, and they don't tell you what that's like after the credits have rolled. We all have dreams until the war comes, then we just have survival.
You don't know how to write prose in a world that's falling apart.
You just know it's been done before,
so who are you to be weaker
than that?
The bursts of energy behind your retina begin to feel like the last sputtering efforts of a gas tank on empty, a lighter down to its last drops of fluid, wanting so much but collapsing before both feet have really left the starting blocks. It's a grueling roller coaster ride, an act of sitting on the giant's chest as it breathes heaving breaths in and out. You soar in the air, only to compress under the weight of your own gravity at the bottom.
You are determined not to give in to the g forces as they play with you.
Thumbing through pages (upon pages) of previous years' words, you find patterns too astute to be ignored. Your words are better in despair, simple thoughts emerging like poetry from your melancholy fingertips. In peacetime they arrive at the door like newspapers, like bar food menus. You cannot force the melody, only sit back on the ride and wait for gravity to press the words from your lips.
I am tired, now.
I will not always be.
You worry about the end of days, about the end of your creative solitude, of demands from the outside world, but when you count your pennies in minutes, you see that you have eons of time unaccounted for, minutes and hours in piles for your creative stretches. Yesterday I saw myself in a light that I thought long had been extinguished. There is magic in Words, still. January spreads out less like a villain and more like a promise, less like the monster that hides in every dark corner and more like a moment's reprieve to hear yourself think again.
My physiotherapist gives me a hesitant nods, lets me out onto the pavement with a hundred conditions and stern reprimands, says you can jog, only jog, I take trembling steps like I do not know this ground beneath me, do not remember this air in my lungs, but of course that is a lie.
For every step I take, I feel more familiar. Every breath leads to another, and things begin to make sense along my spine again. I learn new words, new songs, only to find that they are well trodden paths, that these muscles have memories that are not just darkness, not just step-by-step instructions for grinding a life into pulp, beacuse they know, also, how to run into a sunset, how to be weightless in the frozen air. The last few blocks I sprint, I gain speed like i'm trying to fly, I hear her voice saying jog, inly jog, but January is giving me gifts I didn't know I could ask for, how do you expect me not to break myself
to catch them?
The remains of the snowstorm linger, patches of ice untouched by blue salt pellets which get strewn like rice at wedding, like an act without consequence, everywhere else in the city. I navigate slick sidewalks in morning light still piercing in its chill. You remind yourself you were born to live through this, and worse. A furnace within you hears the call and kicks into high gear, you return home steaming.
It hasn't passed me by unnoticed that this returned derangement has set affairs in order around my spine, has opened treasure chests long closed in my imagination. The irony is not lost on me how the flood of mental illness seems to break the dams and release the floods without which I have been aching. I resist the trope like I paid a full college tuition to be delivered out of it, and I'm not yet prepared to swallow the debt.
But I wake with the remains of intricate dreams on my tongue, long stories weaved like ribbons out of the air. I sit quietly on the bus with the constant chatter of podcasts and top 40s muted in favor of letting my thoughts wander, my eyes follow their flights of fantasy to illogical conclusions. Any moment I don't spend bleeding sorrow and despair into the January winds, I am carried off into stories, into the idea that the walls are porous and if one just takes that first step, Wonderland lies waiting beyond.
I said long ago I'd give up all the comforts a Normal life affords, that I would accept this disease willingly, so long as it let me remain in the land of the Word, and so many times I've had to eat those words when held over the cliff's edge with nothing to show for it but empty pockets. But then there comes a moment, in the unending night, when you see the tendrils of a story sprout from the darkness, see them coil and twist around the tar in which you've been buried, see them grow and turn to stars in your hand, and every prayer you've ever held to join the land of the living melts from your lungs like an ice patch on the street. Perhaps it kept you safe, for a while, and shielded.
But the bruises are what tell us we've lived.
A cycle repeats itself, twists and turns in uncomfortable threads, you've seen this wolf before but the sheep's clothing is abandoned, there was a time when you rose in rebellion, marched on the bastions of rule, but those days are gone now, you are tired, defeated.
But there's an ember from the last round that lingers, there's a Santa Ana wind in your ear drum that remembers how to set itself aflame, the four years that followed the last time you fell were also the most beautiful in weaves of creativity, in beacons of potential. When everything crumbles, you have no choice but to put yourself together,
When everything turns black with evil,
you have no choice
but to turn the flame into a
flashlight
and lead the way
out.
