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.