A Very Long Day

It has been over 34 hours since I'd woken up, a cold and dreary Sunday dawn. I made the mistake of pushing through a little further and going on a trip to the store. There were a few other stops, really, I had adrenaline coursing through my veins, I'd had a few bowls, caffeine, plus the mistake of an Altoid on an empty stomach during a long, stop-and-go, winding drive. All of this, of course, was unforeseen, and I'd have just stayed home like I originally intended had I known what was to come.

Nausea, vertigo, headache - I felt miserable. When we arrived at the store, I opted to stay in the car, where I soothed my stomach and began writing this as a distraction (a fairly effective one at that.) I still dread the parts to come and daydream of sleeping in my bed, right now.

I was depressed. Anxious, too, with a dash of paranoia. That's how it started in the drizzly, cold Sunday morning. I started the day with more of a pick-me-up. I sort of drifted through the day, dissociating and fading in and out. Time sped and slowed, warped and inconsistent. I had intellectual engagements, even started to feel less disengaged.

That night, I'd vaporise a pipe of tobacco for the first time - a far better experience than smoking a cigarette, but not much more appealing. I returned to my favored plant the rest of the time. Later in the night, atop the nicotine, pouring adrenaline in my veins, I also had some of my Aunt's French press coffee.

Derealisation. Everything began to turn surreal (almost time for my next dose of lithium and clomipramine, come to think of it - a few more hours.) Everything became satire, absurd, unreal, even dilirious.

Another miserable, winding car ride. I can't stand the vertigo, the sea-sickness on land.

I'll work on settling my stomach, taking my meds, and going to sleep. Almost home...

Dispel

I started this life utterly ignorant, naïve, and gullible. I was faithful, innocent, and gave the benefit of the doubt. This, naturally, was taken advantage of from the beginning by those of all ages. Pranks and hoaxes, fairytales and 'white lies' - I was being taught that no one was to be trusted, people enjoy (and frequently engage in) deceiving others, that people defined the 'truth' as whatever they wanted it to be. "Beliefs, experiences, thoughts, feeling are all equally real and indisputible." Easy to dismiss criticisms when the truth is what you make it.

So, it was those who deceived me, pranked me, lied to me, dismissed my curiosity and scepticisms: it was those people in my life who set me on the hyper-rational, hyper-corrective, hyper-critical path on which I found myself to be prolific. Combined with various preëxisting affinities, I've come to focus my life on discerning truth, even to my own detriment.

What purpose does deception serve others, but to teach them how easily they are deceived? I was taught the mind is fallible, that experiences are only vaguely real, that one's view at one time may fail to match one's view at another, that truth is found outside of ourselves, our lenses, our sense of self. Objective truth simply is, regardless of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, experiences. We can only know subjective truth from within, which is honesty, but honesty is not the same as fact. It is up to us to seek objective truth, always, by travelling outside of ourselves.

Objective truth is a resource we cannot manufacture. It is a resource we desperately need in order to prosper, to grow and progress both as individuals and a collective. Objective truth requires that one acknowledges their own fallibility, that one may change their beliefs when their beliefs no longer fit the evidence.

Jazz Everywhere - A Relatively Mild Manic Adventure

21:30, I wake up. I sit upstairs, watching TV, socialising with Mom until sometime past midnight. After making a burrito, I go downstairs to my room and play games and watch videos, that time broken up by reading articles and social media, plus some light reading of a novel. I spent much of the time not watching videos by listening to Nu Jazz/Jazztronica. By 05:30, I begin muscle-building and aerobic exercise in my room. By 06:00, I went out for a jog, walk (about a mile each), and took photos (I ended up taking photos the rest of the day.) Around 07:00, I returned home and went with Mom to take my sister to school. Soon after returning, I went along for my grandpa’s eye appointment. We got pizza afterward and returned home. Back to my room before noon, listening to more jazz and writing drum notation on graph paper. More videos, social media, and exercise. Did some chores, helped out, but mostly spent time alone in my room. By 16:30, I took a shower and got ready. By 17:30, we headed out to my sister’s school again, but for student presentations. It was crowded and bothersome, loud and bright, but I got through it (and captured more photos on the way.) Around 18:00 we arrived, and stayed at the school until about 19:30. We returned home, I worked out some more, listened to yet more jazz, and finished composing my drum notation. By 22:00, I said goodnight to my mom for the second time since I woke up. By 23:00, I started winding down and drifting gradually into sleepiness. I technically woke on Tuesday. I'll go to sleep when it's technically Thursday.

Believe

I could ‘astral project’, if I really wanted to call it that. This is merely an extreme expression of Theory of Mind: to be able to imagine another person’s life, thoughts, feelings, location, experiences, circumstances… You paint a vivid picture of a life, a place, a thought, an experience not your own. Does your ‘Spirit’ travel to another place or time? No, of course not. But the ability just to imagine it exemplifies an impressive Theory of Mind, and in turn an impressive sort of empathy.

I could be psychic, if I chose. I’ve borderline-disturbed some people with my ability to notice, in particular, what others do not. Some have even suggested I had various kinds of spiritual or celestial abilities, which is inherently absurd. During a chronic period of psychosis, such suggestions led to the delusion that I was communicating with a witch whose image I saw in the woodgrain of my bedroom door, at the time.

I wanted to believe. Growing up, I wanted to believe in all the silly, extraordinary, supernatural things others did. I wanted to believe… simply because others did. I wanted to believe because my mom did, and she taught me it was good to believe. But whenever I asked people questions about religion, I either got no answer at all (if not admonishment) or an answer which simply led to another question.

As I approached my teens, I began studying theology. Not just the theology I was raised on, but as many as I could cram into my skull. I saw pattern after pattern, and for much of my adolescence, I thought there must be something to it. The sheer number of believers, how fervently people believed, and the power their beliefs seemed to have over them suggested it wasn’t like fairytales and fiction. I observed the most truly outlandish real world events, all attributed to something spiritual and invisible.

I was actually taught very, very early on that doubt was simply a packaged deal with the supernatural. One could never objectively know if it did or did not exist, but to believe anyway was called faith, and faith was good. To say the least, I am habitually more obedient than I would honestly desire or think good for me. I was taught of sacrifice, martyrdom, and that giving was inherently better than receiving. Selfishness is sinfulness, and a natural, faithful death leads to the ultimate prize.

But I just never really believed. As much as I tried, as curious as I was, as faithful as I tried to be… I suppose something never quite clicked with me like it did so many others. I even tried Universalism: the idea that all faiths, beliefs, and interpretations were at least a bit right. That led me to Pantheism: the idea that all existence IS God. Which led to the most deceptively fragile belief system, which was the closest to my beliefs now. One thread was pulled to unravel it all: “Doesn’t that just make God a metaphor?”

I go back through the different theologies, religious texts, historical contexts and I just saw metaphor, metaphor, metaphor… Early in my pantheistic stage, where I had worked up to the logical reconciliation that all existence must be God for God to exist, I had begun watching the show Bones.

I really related to the stoic, opinionated, know-it-all lead character with a hyper-rational, critical view of life. She, an anthropologist, and lover of human culture, regularly dismissed the other lead’s Catholicism, and all other religions, as myths. Other characters would often react (ironically) in disbelief, shocked at her blasphemous use of ‘myth.’ She’d reason that all modern religions were fundamentally like the Roman and Greek myths now studied (and occasionally still believed.) She also dismissed psychology and philosophy as soft sciences, though she gradually changed her stance after observing their proper applications.

Bones, and the religious discussions had all over the world all throughout all kinds of media, had their impacts. I saw arguments from so many different sides, it’s easier to reference degrees than sides. I was not so insulated. In fact, particularly given my early attachment to the electronic world, and given my own eccentricities, I was bound not to be incredibly insulated. And I gorged on the information, the cultures, languages, the different views, opinions, interpretations, circumstances… It got absorbed, digested, and organised (through a much-more-gruelling-than-that-sounds process.)

And then the thread got pulled. “If it’s all a metaphor, what’s the point?” That was a good question. I was the kid who, at a tiny elementary school Christmas play in the country, said to all the other children, “Santa’s not real. No, Santa doesn’t really exist.” One of my friends, at the time, asked how I could say such a thing, appalled at my behavior. I just thought, “It’s wrong to lie.” My own fundamental, religious teachings - combined with my unusually rationalistic and logical mind – had begun the very dismantling of those very religious beliefs. Santa wasn’t real, therefore saying Santa is real is a lie. Lies are bad, therefore saying Santa is real is bad. That’s how my mind always worked.

I saw the value in fantasy, fiction, metaphor, story telling… I just could never quite see why, for instance, Harry Potter was any different from the Bible, or vice versa. Both stories, filled with metaphors which intuitively resonated with many. Or cults – what distinguished a cult from a religion other than number of adherents or their extremity? History told me people believe things until they find more socially compatible or scientifically provable things. ‘Greek myths helped less sophisticated men understand the world. We know better, now.’ This is what most everyone seemed to agree with.

So why was religion – modern, anyhow – so special? With this religion, we ‘know better’? With these religions? Instead of literal, it’s just figurative, now? Are we just waiting for our next prophets to usher in the new edition of the one and only version of the real faith, in an endless cycle of new faiths and interpretations to better fit the times? Will we ever know? If religion is just the unknown, does it, or God, become less and less as we learn more (the so-called 'God of the Gaps.') Does it even matter?

‘Does it even matter’… I’ve come to develop this view that I digested religions, deciphered their metaphors, sifted for the nuggets of wisdom and common sense, and just washed away every single supernatural, mystical, divine, spiritual element. It feels like I solved the riddles, or completed some kind of training, and now I’m ready to move on. The more I learn of the sciences, the more awestruck I am by nature, and the more baffled I am that anyone needs to believe in more.

Based on the evidence I’ve come across, I would say that more often than not, people all see the same reality, but all people speak mutually unintelligible languages. We say different words for the same things, and then argue which word is the actual, correct word. We kill; we condemn; we brutalise others because we can’t translate; we confuse our subjective experience with objective fact, and assert that upon others.

So, again, I ask this rhetorical question – does it even matter?

Alexithymia

Derived from a brief discussion I had. I'd realised after first saying it that I had, to my surprise, worded things rather well. This is an irony I've become strangely familiar with:

I spent most of my life thus far viewing my emotions as either extremes (mania, aggressive, panicked) or as incredibly flat (blah, fine, okay, blank, empty, nothing), but it seems to be due to alexithymia (difficulty identifying, defining, and/or expressing emotions.) I used clinical terminologies based on objective observations (ergo manic, depressed, anxious), and I only identified the emotions that were extreme enough or 'bad' enough to be quite obvious.

While I thought I was fully aware of what I did and did not feel, it turned out I had a massive blind spot for nearly every normal, even healthy, emotion. They were there, but my cognitive instrument for seeing them was calibrated for far too little sensitivity. The limited sensitivity meant I had profound difficulty even picking up on the more moderate and lesser emotions. I also came to confuse behavior for emotion, though the two are far from the same (and, often enough, paradoxical.)

I've had to very, very carefully 'listen' for what I was feeling at any given moment. I had to find a great deal of silence, time alone - an emotionally and mentally sterile environment. I needed, and still often need, this kind of environment (to the best of my abilities) so that I may exclude all the noise and peripheral data.

Finally, with much time and dedication, I've become overall more attuned to the finer, subtler waves beneath the waves. I can better identify emotions big and small that are woven into the fabric of my mind. I'd simply taken them for granted, and misunderstood them. Now I see my emotions are ceaseless; they merely vary in frequency, magnitude, and form. I eat a blueberry, and I can identify that the sourness can be slightly irritating and surprising, but the fruitiness and earthiness can be pleasant and soothing. All of that is emotion, and it briefly flickers by, easily unnoticed or forgotten. But it was there, and it's an important piece of my subjective, human experience.

A Little Shaus in the Morning

I wake up irritable, yet calm, in the darkness. My first response in Facebook is the irreverent dismantling of another’s argument (pointing out a false dichotomy and such.) However, as I plan ahead for their possible future response, my mind is consumed with a verbal onslaught, ripping into their flesh with words. “All you do is bitch, whine, and moan like the fucking toddler that you are,” I imagine myself ever so bluntly and coldly saying to my ‘opponent,’ not the faintest sign of emotion on my face. Cool, calm, and lethal.

I roll myself out of bed in one smooth motion and proceed up the stairs. Mom is making a chicken pizza on the Boboli pizza crust I had plans for. When she first brought it home, she said that I could make a pizza sometime, to which my mental musings had envisaged the idea of roasting a pizza over hot coals on the grill. I had the plans, but not the ingredients. I wanted mozzarella and provolone, not cheddar. I wanted a sweet and savory marinara and not just generic spaghetti sauce. I wanted to make this simple, pre-baked Boboli pizza crust into something special.

She was using the generic sauce, canned chicken cubes, and cheddar cheese. Blasphemy. I quickly crack my metaphorical whip, “You’re using my Boboli?” I stress the ‘my’ just enough to be noticed.

She gives me a bit of a look, but returns to her work explaining that she needed to find something that Grandpa would eat, and then asks why I wished she hadn’t used it.

Without a second in between, I respond with, “Because it looks stupid.”

“Well, alright, then,” she continued her work as I diverted to the bathroom. Why did I say ‘stupid’? Insults and otherwise abrasive words flood my mind, but the original word had vanished.

Upon returning to the kitchen, I say briskly and bluntly, “Frankly, I don’t know why the word ‘stupid’ sprang from my tongue. I had another word, at first, but it disappeared. I tried to recall it, but my mind was blank. It was as though my tongue pondered, What would really roll off me? 'Because it lookssss – stupid!' That’ll work."

“If that’s an apology, I accept.” Mom’s skin has been thickening. A real duck, she’s becoming.

I then monologue, muse, and elaborate, “My initial reaction was disgust, not so much about what you were making, but because you were using the Boboli I was planning to use. And I seem to have woken up irritable.” My body trembles. “And I’m getting shivers when I’m not cold. That happens when I’m overloaded.”

She made a remark about the season finale we had watched last night of Orange is the new Black having overloaded me, perhaps only half jokingly.

I open the fridge, finding there to mostly just be knock-off cans of Coke or water. I don’t like colas, but I grab one (which my mom reacts to with moderate surprise.) Shrugging, I respond with, “When I’m overloaded, I just need something fizzy to go down my throat. I don’t really care about flavor so much as the sensory input.” Then, popping open the can, I continue, “It has happened from time to time,” to which she admitted recalling.

I sit down, watch a British bread baking show, and find a bountiful logorrhœa of snarky (and honest) remarks being vomited out of my mouth. After 10 or 15 minutes, and a slightly larger audience than just my mom, I return to my dark cave of a bedroom.

What a wonderful first half-hour of my day…

The Library

The smells of Maryland in the summer. Not city Maryland. Green, fresh, wild Maryland. The plants, the fungi, the soil, the animals. I can hear the symphony of birds, crickets, cicadas, frogs, streams, rain, wind, thunder, leaves, pitter-patter on the windowpane. Cool darkness, fireflies, petrichor, and moonlight. It's all there, stowed away in my mind.

I told him I hated him. Something... ruptured. Something buckled and snapped inside. Tears, pain, fear... A meltdown. Everything felt out of control. Being forced out of our house, then shipped across the country in the muggy summer heat. Oh, and don't forget the hysteria that fills me up just before both take-off and touch-down. Jetlag. That horrid sun pounding its rays down on us. Bright, loud, crowded, foreign... D.C. was the worst.

I was tired, fed up, unsure where it was I was even going to end up when I went 'back home.' My things were packed and in Limbo... I was in Limbo...

*

Hikes... nearly 10 miles, Hurricane Ridge, Washington State. Again (though long before), I felt like I was on a bungee cord. There was ‘at home,’ and then there was ‘with Dad.’ The two became quite distinct. Military, Navy, kept him moving. We only visited him, though the offer to live with him was always present (and always declined.) Time with him was always moving, always tired, always elsewhere. I didn’t really want to move… I just wanted to stay put.

Halfway, maybe three quarters, I went ahead, just out of view down the trail, and I ran. I 'got away.' I took in some solitude, views of the lake, the nature... I finally felt like I could breathe again after a mounting pressure burst. Little did I know my dad would frantically search for me, skidding down a hill at one point, bloodying his leg. His efforts, my guilt...

*

“Future President” the somewhat oversized T-shirt read. As if school wasn’t enough pressure. All my dad’s efforts – all those failing efforts – what else could I do but stow them away..? I couldn’t refuse them, nor destroy them, nor return them. So they got neatly, politely stored, acting as a passive reminder of guilt each time I opened the drawer. Guilt that my dad’s efforts were hidden from the world, deliberately and wilfully by me.

*

Sitting on my bed, 22 years old, pseudo-hallucinating vivid flashbacks, triggered by such minutiae as the smell of an herb, taste of the air, sound of a bird chirping or a raindrop hitting glass… It’s all stored in there. It’s a vast, vast library long neglected, craving perusal. Holographic.

Echoing in my mind, "6 pounds and 7 ounces..." Ingrid Michaelson's 'Highway.' It sounds distant and warped, as though fluid, underwater, emanating from down a winding hallway. It swirls in the midst of a jumbled, juxtaposed cacophony, round and round. It’s a cyclone, bursting with wrathful lightning and thunder…

Pandora’s Box. My mind..

The Hallway

This is how it feels. The result of mania twisting into an agitated depression mixed state, colliding into dissociation, leading to insomnia, and tumbling down into major depression, all in a 48 hour period.

It's not simply positive or negative. Both endlessly swirl around me like an infinite hallway through existence. A library of all that is, was, or ever will be. A realm where infinity dispels all notion of time, and the singularity of all existence stagnates. No longer is the painting being painted. Completed, the process all over, it simply is -- in its entirety, never changing.

Excerpt - Science, Spirituality, and the Brain

Cognitive dissonance arises when different parts of the brain are active, but struggle to communicate with one another. Inevitably, reality and perception clash. One’s perceived reality becomes like a disjointed blending of mutually exclusive narratives, as though trying to reconcile To Kill a Mockingbird and Moby Dick as the same book. In this analogy, the individual tears out various pages from the two books and tries to bind them into one book which haphazardly shifts from one incoherent narrative to another. Eventually, you loose both narratives in the process.

Polarisation happens when different parts of the brain act in opposition to one another. A person may reject all emotion in favor of logic, or they may reject science and reason in favor of religion. Certain parts of the brain become much more dominant than others. In some ways, parts of the brain may become atrophied, whether from lack of use, damage, isolation from the other parts, or some other cause. This results in very specific areas of the brain becoming heavily fortified and mutually exclusive from the ‘weaker’ parts. The weaker parts continue to fade due to a lack of incorporation. Using the previous analogy of To Kill a Mockingbird and Moby Dick, polarisation would be like asserting that To Kill a Mockingbird is a book, but because Moby Dick is not To Kill a Mockingbird, it is somehow not a book. Polarisation is black-and-white, binary hyper-categorisation.

When a brain incorporates the entirety of its functions and parts, one can finally realise that To Kill a Mockingbird and Moby Dick are both books, that there is no false dichotomy of one book being ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong,’ and that they can coexist without being melded into a single, incoherent text.

Ants

As a kid, I used to just sit outside in the spring and summer in the early evenings, right around when the sun sank beneath the hills and tree canopies. The sprinklers ærosolised the pollens and dust, filling the air with the smell of suburban nature. Soon after, the smell of barbecues would waft from yard to yard. I'd sit in tranquil solitude, watching the ants marching, transporting, and constructing. I imagined the lateral dissection of their seemingless endless, interwoven tunnel systems. I brought myself down to their scale, viewing their societies, their languages, their politics and wars... I imagined their daily lives, their hierarchies, their struggles and accomplishments. I did this until the sun faded, and the lighting became a softer, dimmer blue.

My whole life, I've seen patterns that seemed to zoom in and out infinitely. Human, ant, bacterium, molecules, atoms, subatomic particals... Humans, governments, planets, solar systems, galaxies, the universe. Whichever way I zoomed, be it larger or smaller, I saw the same patterns repeating and repeating: fractals.

It was order. It felt natural.

7 Streets Over

As it turns out, this is a story best told backwards…



I’ve reached my tranquil end at the intersection of J Street and my own. I’ve reached the peak, so to speak, and decided to take some moonlit pictures and recordings of the morning birds. It’s about 04:30, just before dawn, and my legs are warm. I breathe in large lung-fulls of brisk, dark air. I smell the automated sprinklers, shaded lawns, pines, and oaks. Now, I turn around.

I begin my return home. The quiet, wide, residential streets are empty of all traffic. In fact, I blissfully stroll down the middle with no fear, at all. The only sounds are the early birds, the occasional distant dog bark, and my own footsteps. This isn’t like my home just several blocks down. Certainly, they’re calm and quiet compared to the city we hug, but my streets have a car whooshing by every minute or so, in the dead of night, on either side of the block. One side is a major road with a fork, several lanes, and a mini-mart smack dab in the middle of the prongs. The large main road and complex canyon-like arrangement of houses cut through by streets, walled with trees, riddled with slopes, creates a powerful Döppler Effect. If you hear an increasingly high pitch whooshing sound, you know a car is approaching our street. You learn to translate the echoes into specific directions and vectors. Even if cars don’t come down our street often, it’s good to sense when a car might turn onto it and to get out of the way.

These streets are big, though. While my streets can have a car parked on each side with just enough wiggle room for one lane of traffic, mind you on a two-way street, these more isolated, quieter streets I’m walking down boast having cars parked on both sides with easily enough room to fit two free lanes for traffic. My streets have scars, pot holes, whole chunks of loose asphalt bigger than my foot lying crumbling in the road. These streets are black, smooth, and glisten in the moonlight. The houses here are all small and box-shaped with giant oaks, towering evergreens, and tidy lawns. Our houses are clunky, hodge-podge, and of greatly varied neatness. Some of the houses on my streets are vacant, in disrepair, and even overgrown with knee-high grasses, weeds, and unkempt trees. I remind my astonished self that I only walked 7 streets over. I can begin to hear the turbulent rumble of the city in the distance as I get closer.

Suddenly, I feel as though going from walking in secluded, tranquil woods to a vast and open expanse with a mostly unobstructed view of the sky. In the near distance of about two city blocks, I see two giant, broadleaf trees towering over a wall of smaller trees of varying shapes and sizes. They appeared as though a looming gate to a mystical kingdom.

WHOOSH! A car passes from left to right just beyond the looming tree gate. The car was soaring down the main road. I look up the vast opening to the sky and watch the stars, fading as sunlight gradually intrudes into the atmosphere from over the hills. 05:00 nears and I’ve just a bit further to go to return home. Street lamps illuminate the seemingly endless streets in the north, south, and east. To the west, from whence I return, it is darker and seemingly insulated from the city it skirts the edge of.

Another car whooshes by quite predictably, alone, and I cross the multi-lane north-south arterial. The sky is relatively open, the suburban skyline scraggly and uneven, the yards greatly varied, the constant hum and periodic whooshing of cars in the background: I am home. I walk up the two aggregate steps to my door, open my wallet, slide out my key, and unlock my front door. I walk down my stairs, open my bedroom door, and sit on my bed. It’s good to be back…

Even if it was just 7 streets to and fro, and about 30 minutes.

Overload

I wake up, groggy, and walk out of my bedroom. I walk down a dark hallway into a dark alley. The alley opens up to a cold, rain-drenched cobblestone road with gas lamps in either direction. Each direction is a mirror of the other, parallel wherever I go. I make it to a vast wooden bridge which crosses a moat, and I arrive at a fortress. They ancient stonework nearly crushes me, creating an opening through the fortress wall, so I enter. A vast citadel looms high above a seemingly endless maze, and so I enter the Labyrinth. Roars, hisses, growls, and hellish sounds echo indistinctly from all directions, but I move onward. I go forward, but return where I began. I retrace my steps and find myself somewhere unfamiliar. A supernatural dark cloud forms a wispy ceiling above me. I try to climb the walls, but the climb never ends, so I try to climb back down. Only a few feet down, and I can see the ground again. I chisel through the walls for days, but the walls have infinite depth. As I try to crawl backwards, dreading the rearward journey, but I find myself returned to the path in only a few motions.

Looking forward, I close my eyes, and I begin to slowly walk backwards, dismissing all of my senses.

I open my eyes, and before me is the great citadel. Months spent on this journey, tears well up in my eyes, for I have finally arrived. The doors creak eerily open and I enter. Spiral stairs, millions, go on and on, but I ascend. The slit windows reassure me that I am indeed getting higher in elevation. I finally reach the top, open the door, and find myself on a balcony. I can see my entire journey clearly, from start to finish…

There is no reward, no achievement, no satisfaction. The door slams shut behind me, my heartbeat quickens, and I’m trapped. I pull, I slam, I pound, I kick the door, but nothing happens. I have no tools, no supplies, stranded atop a tower. Days go by, isolated, cold, and hungry. Finally, I lean over the balcony, climb upon the stone wall, and look down.

“Jump…” it whispers. “Jump…” I give in, one foot over, and I fall. A feeling of relief flows through me as I close my eyes and slowly become weightless.

As I wake and open my eyes, I am once again in my bed.

Vee

It always amazes me just how easily a person can leave a life-long impression on a person... One moment, I'm browsing Facebook, reading a bit about critical thinking and science, glancing off to the side looking at the 'Suggested Pages' that I never click or actually show any significant interest in, and then—

BAM!

—it hits me...

A dedication page to a person I once knew online, from a whole other side of the world, South Africa, whom I've never even seen the face of.

Years ago, in my turbulent, early adolescence, hormones going crazy, bipolar going crazy, schizo going crazy, bouncing off and on the rails, I sought out an online support group for mental illness, in general. And I found one, Walkers in Darkness, and I liked it. The community was great, a worldwide chat room for people with mental health issues to seek help and community from moderators and administrators who also had mental health issues, but who always seemed so 'put together,' despite that fact. The admins and mods would give little insights into their own struggles, but they mostly held themselves together to support everyone else who came to them for help and support.

One of them was simply named, "Vee." Everyone liked Vee, everyone knew Vee (some even knew her in-person, if I remember correctly.) Vee was really quite great. But this group had trouble with funding, and they'd have to close shop now and then. Me being me, I usually came and went for long intervals, regardless of funding and if the site was running. I do that. I come, I stay for a little while, then I go for a much, much longer while. Well, one time, I went to look into the group again, some years later.

I found a Facebook page. They still had funding troubles. Okay, I joined the Facebook group. Then I heard. "Vee committed suicide." Maybe not phrased exactly like that, but it hit me just as unceremoniously...

I burst into tears, and I kept thinking, "I didn't even really know her. Why am I so overwhelmed by this? I'd completely forgotten about her..." Well, Vee prevented a few potential suicide attempts of my own. Vee got me through the suicidal thoughts. She helped me when I felt completely alone and hopeless. They may have been very brief interactions, only moments out of my whole life, but they mattered more than anyone could know. They made a difference. They kept me alive.

My mom came into my room, that day I first heard, and I was already consumed by my own tears, unable to catch my breath, unable to talk, barely uttering that someone I once knew online committed suicide, and it was a while ago, and I was just learning about it, so it was hitting me really hard and really suddenly. About every year since, only one or two days a year, I very briefly remember Vee and I burst into tears all over again.

How can you completely forget a person for most of your life, and then so spontaneously, out of the blue, become crushed and overwhelmed by this tremendous, profound, inexplicable weight, cracking your ribs and drowning your airways? How can three letters - V-E-E - so suddenly turn on this long-forgotten switch inside of me where an entire ocean pours forth from reserves I keep becoming so oblivious of for so long at a time?

And so, today, I'm listening to one of my favorite soundtracks from one of my favorite animes from that time in my life when I met and spoke with Vee. I had just happened to think of it earlier in the week and tracked it back down, downloading it. I put that on immediately before, not knowing what was to come just moments later...

"Can you feel?" the singer shouts at the top of his lungs.

"Can you feel that hybrid rainbow?"

Yes, I feel it. Too much. Too strong. I feel it all, like ripping stitches out of an old open wound I thought healed and scarred over, but is just as fresh as the first time... Like being punched as hard as can be in the gut, your gut wrapping and wrenching around the fist, the breath completely gone. You struggle to get your breath back, gasping, choking, feeling like you got sucked into outer space with no air to breathe, blood boiling, eyes getting ready to burst like grapes...

I'm alive, thanks in no small part to her. She took her own life. Life is sad, and gruesome, and some people die, and some people keep living, and there's absolutely no sense why. It's just is how it is...

It fucking sucks.