Hello, I Dislike You Intensely. Have a Nice Day.

I’ve realized how much time being in a relationship takes out of your life. I was amazed the first time I finished all my homework and it still wasn’t even 9:00. That came to be pretty much a nightly occurrence, so I decided to re-join the musical after a week of being gone. They all crowded around me and lifted me into the air. I had a hard time believing it was actually me up there. I always thought it was an action other people were worthy of, epic and amazing people, never me. But hey, it happened. That’s gotta count for something.

I’m really excited for tomorrow – me and Marina are going to wander around downtown on an “I Must Belong Somewhere” scavenger hunt, like the Bright Eyes song. We’re gonna try and find and take a picture of everything the song mentions. Hopefully it’ll take more than one day, because it’s no fun if you find everything all at once. Plus, I really want to hang out with her more.

--

No way. Just. Noooooooo. Waaaaayyyy.
Jesus.

I went in to see Dr. Kessler today, and the receptionist told me, “Oh, he’s not working here anymore. He got transferred.”

“That’s impossible! He just got here,” I said.

Then, she was like, “Okay, whatever, so I know I’m supposed to keep this a secret, but I don’t care if it ruins the integrity of the group. I never wanted to work here anyway. The truth is, one of the superiors found out some girl gave him a handjob, and she was a patient.”

…Alrighty then. It was nice the week…or two days, I mean…or whatever it lasted.

--

I hope that was the last time I will ever break down because of Alex. He’ll never make me collapse again. It’s done.

I hate him.

January gave me hope that I could breathe again, simply and evenly, without his voice, without his touch, without his smell or his words or his wit, without the philosphy that I was a useless shitty girl without my god-like boyfriend. Every day, I let go of that mindset a little bit. It was like a giant octopus with my brain in its clutches, and day by day, I was pulling its sucky-things off me with loud, satisfying popping noises.

Uh-huh. Right. And then comes February, which pulled me under the water where all the monsters and parasites live, and I couldn’t breathe at all anymore. I shut down, cried uncontrollably, and stayed in bed for days. I crawled into my closet, found my scarf with the tear in it, and fingered the tear innumberable times, wishing the scarf had been made of something stronger. I slept with it like a stuffed animal, and fantasized about death.

Then I got sick, and then I got sicker, and my lung collapsed. The x-ray showed a black splotch, the empty space that was left in my chest. I cried because it was so true. Maybe I only thought I was strong, but I never would be, my insides would always reveal how weak I was. I spent two days in the hospital, listening to emergencies and panic sound from behind the blue curtain, but couldn’t help feeling that if I lifted the curtain, all I would see was a tape recorder from which all the sounds spewed and screamed theatrically.

The first day there, I hoped constantly that it would be the end, that my lungs would fail and it would all be over. The second day, I woke up and realized I was relieved to have woken up. Dying scared me again, which meant the depression was starting to fade. I cried a second time because I was so scared it wasn’t really happening; I’d been so, so close to the edge. It was even worse than my failed suicide, because then I wasn’t thinking. My brain couldn’t function then, so there’s a little distance between myself and the act I did. But this time, my entire soul had wanted it. My brain and my heart and my conscious and subconscious. It’s not something you can go through and come out the same as you were.

On the second morning in the hospital, my thoughts flashed back to the newspaper headline I’d read on the first day I ever ditched; the one about the girl whose lungs collapsed when the bus driver made a sudden stop and she hit the seat in front of her. No one knew why because stuff like that hardly ever happened to people who were perfectly healthy. But maybe the girl on the bus had a secret reason too. Maybe there had been something wrong, waiting to fall apart.

I got better, and my breathing came back. They gave me an orange bottle of pills to take; one night I dreamt I was swallowing multitudes of them, caught in another depression. But when I woke up and realized it was only a dream, I cried with relief. I counted the pills in the bottle, once, twice, thrice, to make sure they were all still there, and they were.

I never get manic anymore. For a long time, it’s just been depressions that come up from behind and ambush me, no ridiculous high beforehand. I don’t want to be either anymore. I just want to be happy when good things happen and sad when bad things happen. That’s all. At the beginning of the year, when I wrote in the first entry about a secret I had, I highly suspect there was a tiny part of me that was proud to be bipolar, that wanted it as much as it hurt. It gave me an edge, made me interesting and tragic; it gave me a reason to martyr myself and to wallow. I’m a wallower. There was an argument me and Alex had once where one accused the other of being a wallower, but I’ve completely forgotten who said what now. It’s way in the past. Hell, it was last decade. All of that was.

I hope my emotions get more and more tolerable. It’s possible the depressions will never go completely away (and the therapist debacles I’ve been having aren’t helping), but all of them potentially in the future will have one less reason to rise. One more reason to starve. I hope I never let anyone hold so much power over me again. A hurricane swept through my life and also swept everything clean. The walls are now so white and high and rebound the slightest sound into an echo. Tabla rasa’s are so intimidating. But I looked around me and realized I’ve already started painting the walls, there’s already furniture in the room.

Me and May and the other kids from the musical hang out on a regular basis now. We go to musicals that are in town, or musicals without songs (also known as plays), or concerts, although the guys refuse to be dragged to ballets. It’s okay, though, because us girls make it a really girly event. Sometimes we make re-enactments of productions we’ve seen, except more ridiculous, involving things like Hitler-staches, Longcat, and tap-dancing. Then we post them on YouTube and wait to get famous, though we just can’t seem to get a break. Most of the comments so far are “lolwut” types or accusing us of being Monty Python wannabes. That’s probably true, but it’s okay. Someone else accused us of anti-Semitism, even though, oddly, it was the Jewish kid who insisted on the Hitler-stache in the first place.

Marina and I are almost done with our “I Must Belong Somewhere” scavenger hunt. We’re not just snapping a picture and leaving, though, we’re trying to make each shot artistic. I’m thinking I might take up photography. And maybe ballroom dancing. And maybe rock climbing. Marina’s dad is a forest ranger, and both our families might go camping sometime soon, and he’ll show us how to rock climb.

Sometimes I’ll randomly run into Delia. We don’t talk about Alex anymore, and I’m glad. It’s a relief to no longer dwell on the past. Instead she’s teaching me how to swear at people in French, and gotten me hooked on Camera Obscura. We’ll probably go thrifting sometime.

I still go see Coralie. I promised to be her friend, and I’ll never let her down. We talk about everything in the universe, except with a philosophical bent. She tells me about fish that change genders and St. Elmo’s fire and wormholes and transmigrations of souls. Sometimes nostalgia comes to her and she can’t help but talk about her son, even though she knows it’s hard for me. But it’s more than understandable if your child and his stand-in family disappears off the face of the planet.

When I came back to school after being gone almost two weeks, I told my friends the entire truth about my absence and surprisingly, no one pitied me. They helped me get through the miniature Hell of Valentine’s Day, and kept helping me. They had me surrounded, making it impossible to go any direction but upwards. Now when we go out I’m happy afterward, but there’s a hushed blue peace there that wasn’t before, taking the place of the mania. Maybe the mania was just an unresolved energy needing to be spent on friends. Who knows.

March is nearly half over and the passage of time is surprising. It’s been almost a season since Alex left – is that really possible? We went out for a season, now the time we’ve spent together is almost equal to the time I’ve spent without him. Every day it’s getting closer to equal. And then afterward, the time without him will be more, and more.

I want spring to be here so I can lay under a blooming tree and watch the sun shine translucent green light through the new leaves; so I can wait for the wind to blow their petals into my cupped hands; and feel whole and not “more than twice the sum of my parts” but endless.