Don’t Envy What You Weren’t Prepared to Pay for

Don’t envy what you weren’t prepared to pay for.

*****

17 years earlier

They think I’m stupid. Naïve. Dumb. She actually asked if it was the first time I’d had sex. Ha. If only.

“Maybe this Lazaro raped her?”

“We admire your courage” and other bullshit.

Course now, with all the years of hindsight, it’s easy to change the story, swap characters in the arc, fudge the memories. But I remember.

Don’t even need to live on the same continent to hear their voices. Soundtrack to my life playing robustly in my mind.

The doctor: “Do you hear voices in your head?”

Me: “No.”

Because she hadn’t said what would happen to Ella.

Fast forward. 2016. Diagnosis: Bipolar Disorder.

Finally understanding that the chatter in my head isn’t normal.

Fragments. Strands. Shards. Filament. Dust dancing slowly in a needle of sunlight.

Layers. Layers of not quite settled matter. The rocks are not solidified. Is this why I love palaeontology? Discovering fossils from a hidden time.

I still feel the smart of

My eyes still smart

I’m good at hiding

You won’t find me

Yet he always did.

*****

Present Day – 2020

Ten words a minute. In this lockdown, I’ll get a count of twelve hundred a day.

Rewinding to last month.

This human state.

I wandered around for half an hour. Thumb on a contact.

Then relief when I called home.

Fragmented thought. Insanely good-looking. Those eyes.

Emailing the playwright. Wanting to write a piece called The Playwright.

Struggling to keep up with my own pace of creation. I birth fast. But these hesitations – these – these – what are they? – these delays in getting stuck in, they make this act of writing feel like labour before childbirth. I should know; I’ve done it six times. My womb aches sometimes. Empty. Desolate maybe. I miss Joshua. Faith. Hope. Grace. Baby K.

And then, like a tree reawakening after winter, it puts forth shoots. Veins like roots, pulsing blood. I beat with life, vibrating along the fibres of my being. The tiny one inside flutters like a fragile bird. Grows. Is a miracle. And is born, noise and fruit after all those months of silence. No new way to say this. But each the most beautiful person I have ever seen. As the French midwife said, “make noise like animal”. The smell of the yawn. The weight of the little curled bottom. Snuggled safely on my chest, no need to rush out of this moment. And yet, the tiredness. All perspective lost. Tears over trivial things. Never appreciate sleep so much until it eludes you.

So. Bipolar Disorder.

I inhabit both poles. High and low. North and South. Trying not to be defined by a diagnosis of this human condition. I am more than this, not restricted to this. Possible to heal and to overcome. Off meds now, but in defiance of the pronouncements of Dr. B. She thought that was impossible. Still low points sometimes. Still trauma from decades, layering, layering. And from three years back.

Don’t envy what you weren’t prepared to pay for.