If you can dream of a lake

A poem I wrote in college when my Bipolar was getting really bad and was yet to be diagnosed. I was returning to school after the lockdown and a very traumatic event that occurred that summer.

Some part of me is not a part of today 

I’ll explain the best I can 

Each morning the feeling of leaving something behind creeps down the shadow through the blinds and settles in the breast

It’s the same feeling that pulls me 

warily 

back and forth on a fine piece of filament 

Made of nervous tension

And fingernails

Running through the corner of my hearts 

Perhaps that’s why my heart attacks on the way to the bathroom at 3:32 are not heart attacks at all

They’re

a lupine cry 

 frequent visitors 

inquisitorial and… strange

asking me: are you ready to go? 

Pause. 

Center. 

If you can conceive that it’s rained… dream of a lake. 

Imagine the surface, pregnant and still. Know that my mind is stretched thin across the expanse so that the ripples spread slowly, erratically

that the surface disturbed causes small waves to leak their volume out onto the rocks at the shore and how those molecules are lost. 

They still exist, but they’re not mine anymore. 

So is my transformation. I overflow. 

When I picture my death, I picture first passing through the book fair at Grant Elementary School. 

I’m 5.

I’m smiling. 

I’m greedy to read and very very free. 

If you could smell air like this… air like leaves turning brown and scholastic-sponsored Junie B. Jones you’d want to die breathing it too. 

Who am I grieving for? My cat who I loved more than life is now sitting on my fireplace mantle in a forgotten box, combined in dust with her brother’s form. I basically neglected them posthumously by never digging them a grave. These are the things that dig into me. 

This rain is so, so much heavier than my head 

And I’m tumbling down the hill and 

I’m so far away 

And as I write this I’m a cynic because how precious of me 

 to bemoan my doldrums lost, 

my longest valley of isolation filled in with the mud of returning to life, 

(This place is water and the dry soil was me and the mud is everything. It’s everything. But I’m choking.) 

So I continue to wake up and I continue to choke. And I continue to choke on the spittle in the morning that dried up overdark and I continue to stumble hand over heart to the toilet on my knees in the night. 

And I’m afraid. 

And I feel myself arriving. 

And I wait to be me. 

Today I recognized myself out the window. She’s  a low hanging gray cloud with a deep blue stripe creeping east. Orange leaf blooms from green tree blooms from red dying maple under gray and I look at them and I convince myself that

I love that picture.

Author's Note

Please share your feelings and visualizations you may have experience while reading!