Old Friends Revisit

Bitter discontent without space for words for thoughts with sense the taste within limits sad limits the awareness of such is the taste of mortality of which I deny but again these are just words and I'm avoiding what is real - what is now - present - here

It is humiliating.

It. My emotions. My moods, my extremes, my stories, the grandeur, the darkness, the seeming infinite space of it all, the humiliation of my humanity coming in dosages of atomic energy.

I felt it most when all of this pain was rising up to my cheeks and emitting straight out of my body - the kind that becomes funneled into a sharp human weapon, and my upper body was the blade. I was restrained, and that came to a tip. I chose the restraint, but it didn't feel like choosing at the moment. I had the expectation of being shamed for my behavior before I even showed it. I countered truthful behavior, even if it came in a state of high frenzy and emotional bottle rockets, I countered it with "road apples" as Langston Hughes had called it. They came as weights - because I needed a discipline to ground me as I visited the Pacific in the middle of Karim's room. I sat in the sand for hours as they communicated to each other, but I could only hear tidbits over the sound of the waves and the wind and the crashes of my mind shuttering on and off to the reality before me. I couldn't sit still, and even as I type now, over 24 hours later, my fingers tremble in such a way that indicates to me that I haven't stopped running in my mind, even in darkness, even in the white rooms that I'm starting to see clearer now.

I am humiliated that I am in turmoil. I am humiliated that I show my emotions. I am humiliated that I have no sense of control, and that is now publicly evident. This has happened before, when I was in college. I'd have entire days during which I was passing off in some sort of spastic daze, boisterous, crude, loud, and at the time, I felt like I was jovial, charming, and as delightfully extroverted as ever before; fortunately in the theatre department, eccentricity in any capacity in individuals is the norm, and after a night of building self-shame and exaggerated observations from my peers (all exacerbating this mounting embarrassment), I come back to our long school hallways unseen as other than myself from before.

But not in this group of friends. When they put their attention on me, I was surprised that they haven't noticed the trembling and the speediness of my speech - but then they did, but the noticing was a reaction of questioning: why are you acting this way (I don't believe you)?

Now the quality of humiliation is greatly tinted with an attack on my emotions, which is invariably, always my truth, as my mood in any given moment is always the mood that I find myself in, and whether or not I hide it, I could not hide the mania that was happening in the moment of attention being put on me this night that I was on sandy beaches of Karim's carpet. These were truthseekers, this particular group of friends, but the desire for truth outweighed the desire to accept and be loving - and at any point, I was in the fragile stage of letting out some of the most dangerous, volatile, and absolutely most vulnerable parts of myself. I think I was riding on the precarious edge with this group, because a large part of me wanted to believe that they would rise to meet me - to accept that I was deeply psychotic, and that they still loved me.

I couldn't express that.

Nowhere in my wildest dreams could I have felt and expressed that in the moment.

It was too much to ask.

And already too much to have given them enough to see this part of me.

The part of me that wanted to be lewd and mean and violent to the closest of them. The part that wanted to cry and let out the saddest truths about me. The part that just lets me act out my psychosis and paranoias and fears and delusions and everyone will still be okay, not afeared, and certainly not going to tell me that I'm going to be okay, and that everything I'm experiencing will go away. I wanted them to withstand the maelstrom that is me and not walk away or fix me.

I want that so much now, I'm realizing. That I cannot control my moods, and don't wish to have to control them - but be accepted despite where I am, and loved by those I call friends and lovers.

But I'm too afraid to let them know.

They don't know.

They don't fucking know.

So they question. And this questioning was severe to the fragility of my frightened and paranoid being - that even as they turn their gaze on me, my thoughts were five minutes into a conversation that may or may not happen, that everything they said had slowed down so immensely, that I predicted every next word as they spoke, and I was never, at any moment, present enough to assess the situation enough to calm the irritability and shaken anxiety down. Not once.

In the day since, I've tried to expel my energy as much as I can. I visited my family, driving up and down the chilly San Francisco peninsula. I worked long hours, stayed as long as I could, talked to as many of my friends and had as many conversations that I could take ahold of, ran when I could, and kept my attention rapt to my busmates to and from work. I had bought a wireless router before the meeting of ocean and friends, and I had set it up for Loomis and I. I was getting annoyed that I couldn't use the internet, and wanted us to at least each have our respective computers. I haven't yet expressed the annoyance, but at the same time, the only thing I'm doing with my computer privileges is write nonsense to prevent my hands from hitting the walls and my mind from exploding. We near the middle of the night and in less than four hours, I should be rising from bed to start my day. BUT MY MIND WILL NOT STOP.

I AM TOO SELF CONSCIOUS OF THIS DISEASE THAT THEY HAVE NAMED IN MY BRAIN BUT I WILL NOT BELIEVE IT I WILL FIND EVERY MOMENT'S CAUSE FOR MY TRIGGERS BUT I WILL NOT USE THIS ILLNESS AS A CRUTCH.

I am scared. I am delighted. During my evening drive to Los Gatos, I contemplated driving off the 280 into the beautiful reservoir that dominates the western bay area. I wanted my body to rise up from the water to seep into the thick fog that sometimes like to trickle over the mountain range, back up and over heavy like fingers, hands, back into the Pacific. I thought it poetic, that thoughts of suicide were always coupled with my romanticizing of death. When in practice in the past, however, I would chose the most painful and ugly methods in order to die.

Then I'd find myself in minutes or hours of grace. That everything was a complete joy, and I found myself pouring into dialogue about music, relationships, and something artistic, and knowledgable, and always profound, at least to me.

Everything was fleeting. None of it was of my choosing.

Throughout the day, my hands were poised over several contacts on my phone that I wanted to express, "I need help. For the love of God, please restrain me, because I no longer have that power." Then the moments of tensing would pass, and as I collected my thoughts and logic again, so did the will to be self sufficient and the will to live.

It is with great relief as I'm writing this, that my thoughts have slowed down tremendously. I requested that Elizabeth played an episode of the Tudors to distract at least a fraction of my brain, and the moment she relinquished my computer, I knew that in putting words to my experience, that I'd find less confusion in at least having some manifested copy of my world that wasn't locked in the safe of my mind.

I'm tense living with someone. Elizabeth and I share a bed. I'm usually inclined to let my panic play out in the night, when everyone is asleep, and I'm able to wreak my sheets and pillows into smithereens. I can't do that with a bedmate, lest of all with another person in any general vicinity.

This is the best I can do for a release. Adieu.
I must write more often.
Right now my mind is occupied with something else.