Manic

For days, I have been feeling one small step ahead of a waterfall of grief. I can almost feel the sadness, the doom and the panic and terror right on my heels, breathing down the back of my neck and I’m trying to figure out whether letting it catch up to me would feel better, or worse than the sense of artificial vigor that has taken me over.

I am crazy. That is how I feel tonight, this Christmas Eve. Crazy. I don’t want to remember but I don’t want to forget. I seem to not want anything. I want this crazy mess to be gone but not in the past. I want the whole sordid event to have never happened. I want Chris to walk through the door and wake me up out of my crying nightmare so we can laugh about how silly I am with my bad dreams. I want him to laugh at me for being so dramatic in my sleep and I want us to make fun of each other over coffee in Malden Square. It’s not the hippest place to have a coffee, but Creej would have loved it.

I have been singing a lot, which helps to keep my grief at bay. Yesterday, I practiced for three hours and today I practiced three times for a total of about two and a half hours.

My “mania” as I am calling it is causing me to feel disconnected on both ends: life and death. I’m not grieving (not in the usual sense) and I’m not really feeling that old joie de vivre that used to come so naturally to me. I feel like the little drummer boy after the big mean guy painted the permanent smile on his face, except that I feel like a big mean wizard filled me with a permanent false merriment.

One of the things I truly appreciate about Clay, my social worker, is his willingness to accept and allow me to diagnose myself. I told him I was manic and he didn’t try to correct my usage of the word or clarify to me the seriousness of manic/depression in it’s actual form. Instead, he paraphrased by saying, “Your own brand of mania?” How genius is that? It’s generous, accepting and shows his willingness to brush off small exaggerations in vocabulary in the interest in hearing my story. He puts me at ease. I confess to him that I am a complete Ativan junkie in every sense of the word because I can’t stop taking one Ativan about three times a month. Instead of boring me with the definition of junkie, he tells me that he understands my fear of becoming one. I see so many qualities in him that I require a soul mate to have. He is understanding, patient, accepting, conversational and basically adorable. Most of those qualities are a direct result of his education in psychology. He must have minored in adorability. Yet again, I digress.

I’m trying to get a grip on my personality. I’m up. I’m down. I need to be right in the middle and I’m not willing to get there by taking drugs. I can ride this bucking bronco until I tame it. I will be not be thrown.

I can feel myself involuntarily moving forward. I don’t want to leave Chris but the image in my head as I feel better is that of our hands holding onto each other, slipping, slipping, slipping until I am holding only his index finger between my own index finger and thumb and then, all in one second, he slips from my grip and he’s gone from my life and my memories. I don’t want that to happen. Ever.