Bipolar Butterfly

The Vault: An as yet unnamed psychosis in which a girl perpetually fluctuates between despair and euphoria, experiencing exhausted malaise interludes now and again. Later to be diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder.

Monday

Some say that insanity is relative. I tried to explain to my psychiatrist what it’s like to be me.
‘How do you feel?’ he said.
‘I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know anything at all.’ I said.
‘I understand.’ He said and it made me so very angry that I squeezed my bandaged wrist until the pain made the angry feeling go away. I sat in silence for a while, my brain wouldn’t work and then suddenly I heard myself talking to this sanctimonious prick and I stumbled back on rewind to listen to the first bit that I had missed when I wasn’t listening to myself. This is what I said to him:
‘Imagine the colours of the day taking on life and running to meet in a wash of rainbow condensation. Imagine a void so black and heavy, as merciless as deep space, the depression of which strips every colour of pigment and paints you with its absence. Imagine knowing your responsibility to fight it, to see the world as you used to before the drugs killed every wish, every dream, every angel. Imagine the guilt and the shame that it is your fault that the reaper brands you in dreams, that you break the hearts of those that love you. Imagine being good again after the Russian roulette of your whim. It is the darkest place and it takes the strength of everything to make it right, and you know you can’t, and it kills you and as it kills you it kills them. I am alone in my madness, but I drag them with me on reigns from which they cannot escape. Tell me, doctor – is it an inevitable end?’
He couldn’t answer my question, so I left and went home to make hotdogs; which is weird, considering I am a vegetarian.

Tuesday

Marcus is trying to understand me. He comes to get me after work every night. He bathes me and washes my hair. He doesn’t want me to drink or smoke, but he knows that I need sedating at the moment, I need to drown and suffocate the demon who likes to whine Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ so that the beat of it leaves me hysterical and razor blade friendly. Marcus wants to marry me, but he is terrified that I’m going to kill myself. Being suicidal is such a bore. I’m bored to death of it. Marcus is my lifeboat at the moment and I love him so I’m trying to let him go. He won’t go though, he picks me up every night and washes my hair instead.

Wednesday

I am colour-blind.
He lies next to me; scented waves of honey crumpets permeate the air between us. It is sex all over the upper lip, potent in its tongue numbing muscle and it nestles there, content.
He is gloating; filled up with fire and spit, filled up and filling still; the collector of my nurtured seedlings, my runic fuel, my fear.
His swollen abdomen – gaseous monstrosity heaves up and down like a coma patients’ belly, perfectly metered and every intake sucks me up, sucks and sticks me to his insides, tar black and reeking.
I cannot move. I cannot see.
Eager beads of sweat party through my hair, eating their way through follicles, acid red, scalping me of history so I am left baldly naked up there, ready for my junky cell. I am his inmate soon and there to stay.
I am excited for his waking. I have travelled far for this and his familiar ear. When its swirling depth is close enough I shall begin my screaming, screaming into the void – starless, I shall vomit up the compost into his ear and he shall wake to take my limbs and streak them red and beautiful. His tender lips shall track my body, leaving snail trails of goop that scar my skin tattooed with undeveloped pictures; a negative foray.
Everything is noise – an obstreperous assault inside my wilting brain and I have no strength, I want to give myself to him. I want to feel his rape again, his toxic kiss. I am wet with it, streaming and sticky, my pulse throbs with his nearness to waking and the noise has deafened me utterly now.
I am rigid, chained and panting – as desperate as junky whore.
I cannot wish, for he has murdered every fairy, every god; the death of the wish is his first abomination and has nothing to do with me at all. Faith is long ago pillaged and crushed into his horny feet and then he comes for me.
I am his whore, waiting.
He is my suicide, the desecration of my future and I crumble long, vacant chasms beneath his reign. He is the poison I must swallow as he swallows up my pitiful worth.
I cannot bear to be a faking human girl and must relinquish all unto his will. He sucks me up and in I go to meld with his atrocity, to be as I am worth and nothing more.
He is the reason for my existence. I belong to him and no other. This pulsating beast besides the morphing me, the strangling I, he consumes and licks and I am excited for his molestation.
This is where I belong; this is home; deep inside my suicide.

On sunny days he walks with me, he speaks in wind-chime code into my ear. I flutter up my skirt a little, show a little leg and, unseen by you he slithers in between our love-locked fingers; ensconced, icing up the space between us. I am shielded from the world’s reality and from your love. He batters it away and there it sticks upon historical architecture, hanging like a trapped balloon from the church’s clock – how apt!
The self-protecting part of who I am, clamours falsetto sometimes, and then I feel great gulfs of love and empathy and hope. I seize the tide of this and splutter words of love betrothed, of fireside futures – oh! The smell of coffee kitchens! I am desperate to make you see that part of me is jovial and spirited and free! The darkness of his time-powered supremacy is only gasps away and although unconscious of the fact, I feel a rabid desperation to let you know that here I am! Of worth and substance, goodness, clean purity! It may last for hours, but mostly not. Sometimes a day or two shall pass and I feel like the angel granted passage back to humanity for brief repose. My senses shout and squeal, I must seem a lunatic to you, but it is only that I’m loving being free and part of your reality, a part of your life.
A part of belonging more to you than he.
He finds me eventually and down I go to ski on backward slopes of anxious animals put to slaughter. Slopes of broken glass and nails of tetanus poison. His judgement rips into my feet and I run but only ever end up in his thickly blooded arms again. It is a crazy safety there, an alternate reality that only I can see.
I am mad.
I am frantic to be one of you. He twirls me waltzing on the periphery of your society and I dip my hand to feel its cooling waters. He sucks them dry again, angry with my wanting.
I am mad with wanting; broken and waiting for the miracle, the power to fight.
I am a broken warrior, poised to fight the madness; poised to fight my mad suicide. In this – a brief illusion of reprise the colours of the day are magnificent.