Saturday: Moon-Sailing

It was the day of my friend Jady's bachelorette party, and I was riding with my sister, Stephanie, to the craft and drinks place where we would meet. I'd recently stopped drinking, and I thought it possible that my heightened state was due to my very new sobriety. I felt great, energized and in a good mood, like nothing I'd felt before.

My husband, Mike, was hosting the bachelor party that same night, and the guys had begun to trickle into our basement before I'd left with Steph. I'd called out "I love you!" to all of them before leaving, a weird thing for me to do, but no one batted an eye. Maybe they assumed I was tipsy, pregaming before the bachelorette party, having no idea that I was newly sober.

As we drove, I got the sudden idea that I wasn't living in reality, that maybe I was in a coma somewhere, perhaps after a fall I had in my early twenties. I began to wonder if my friends and family were urging me to wake up with many signs they were sending, signs that were becoming a part of my current reality. I'm not sure where this idea came from, but it seemed to stick. It was a warm October evening, and as we walked to our destination from the parking garage, I picked up on these signs, some street art, a girl in a rabbit hoodie, a song playing in the distance.

At the craft place, we picked our crafts and our drinks. For me, it was a concrete clock and a soda water with lime. I half-heartedly followed the directions for the concrete mix, and when adding it to my mold, I noticed it was a little runny. It seemed fine though. Everything seemed fine! I was happy, dancing around and singing while we made our crafts.

At one point, I had to use the bathroom, so I walked by the other tables. A group of young women at the table next to us smiled at me as I passed by. I glanced at their craft, a large wall-hanging piece that said "We love you!" Spurred on by the good vibes, I entered the hallway to the bathroom where the four faces of the Beatles stared back at me from large photos on the wall. I took this as a good sign. Peace, love, and joy surrounded this joint.

Back at the table, I met one of Jady's sisters, who like me, was an aspiring writer. We talked writing for a while, and at one point, she showed me something she'd written on her phone. "Nothing I would ever publish," she said as she showed it to me. I read the dark words and wondered what it could mean, but still I smiled back at her. "I think we need darkness in art too."

"Like yin and yang," she replied.

Precisely.

Later, I would wonder if she was trying to show me something dark to stop me from looking like an idiot, like in the line from The Who song Behind Blue Eyes. "When I smile, tell me some bad news / Before I laugh and act like a fool." I'd been listening to classic rock obsessively, The Beatles, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, among many others, and those songs seemed to be popping up everywhere.

After our crafts, where my clock took so long to dry, I ran out of time to paint it or finish building the actual clock mechanism, we got tacos followed by a stop at Pins Mechanical for some duck bowling and games. At Pins, loud hip hop had replaced the poppy music from the craft place. "Pinball Wizard" was written in neon cursive along the far wall above pinball machines. Another sign.

During the ride home, I asked Steph to change the music from a dark-sounding St. Vincent song to The Shins, another CD she had stashed in her car. As we drove, I stared out at the nearly full moon and thought, this is it. This is how I die. I was oddly comforted by the thought. I was going to go flying out of the windshield to the dark side of the moon. I was ready to face my death. I'd already told my friends I loved them.

Or maybe it wouldn't be my death. Instead, I would wake up, surrounded by my friends and family, in a hospital bed.

Instead of dying or waking up, we made it home, where the guys had returned for more drinks after the ax throwing bar. I joined them in the basement, suddenly filled with an urge to dance. One of my friends played song after song from Guitar Hero while I danced. At one point, Mike tried to stop me, but I pushed him off. This was something I had to do. I felt it. Another friend sat looking at his phone, probably uncomfortable. I ignored this and kept dancing wildly.

I tried to go to bed at one point, but Mike came into the bedroom and said, "Your friend is here. He wants to talk."

I still have no idea why he said it like that. Had someone else joined the bachelor party? But I stepped outside to find Drew, the bachelor, smoking a cigar. I wondered if it was really Drew I was talking to or someone else, someone who was temporarily taking over Drew's drunk body to talk to me. He was talking about the importance of friendship. At one point, my cat jumped down off the roof of our carport. Somehow, this was another sign, like a cougar from a folk song, the messenger had been sent to tell me something.

We moved inside, where I found my concrete clock and tried to piece together the mechanical parts. Drew continued talking to me about community in his drunken slur. "Not everyone has the Klines and the Melvins," he said, speaking of my family. I had just written the words in my journal that day. I froze and stared up at him. This really was a message I was meant to hear.

"Well, I have this clock," I said. "I'm trying to fix everything with this clock." I'm not even sure if I knew what I meant by that, but I had an inkling that I could "turn back time," just like the song and somehow save the world.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Drew said, the spell broken. My tipsy friend was back. He laughed at my attempt to piece the clock together. Around four in the morning, I finally gave up and went to bed.

 

Sunday: The Seance

From: EE
To: Andrea, Becky, Barrie
Subject: sunday early evening (my house)

possible seance? lol j/k

kind of

I'd been helping my sister replace her car's brakes that day after very little sleep, but I knew I would have to leave around five to go to Elizabeth Ellen's to meet with her and her friends, including a writer friend in town from New York, Barrie Miskin. By this point, I was helping Elizabeth with Hobart and had only hung out with her in person a couple times. I was excited and maybe a little nervous after the joking email about it being a seance. Surely, it was a joke.

But while fixing the car, I heard a song about a witchy woman and began to grow wary. Was I headed into a real seance? And what would my purpose be there? Maybe we were doing a ritual. Maybe I was joining the Illuminati. I'd recently watched the music video to David Bowie's Black Star and had reason to believe (somehow) that I was a monkey, or a cat, or a monkey with a cat, thanks to a Bob Dylan song I'd heard. I sometimes like to refer to my psychotic break as a rock and roll inspired spiritual awakening. Who can say?

Even though I wasn't meeting at Elizabeth's until five, at one, I told my sister I needed to prepare and sat down in my living room to meditate. Both her and my hungover husband tried to convince me to finish my work on the car, but I wasn't moved by their attempts. I would work on it more the next day. I had other work to do.

Now, in my ever-changing mind, the ever-changing world in which I was living in, I was a witch too and needed to prepare for this gathering of fellow witches. That meant I was supposed to meditate. So I slowly spent the next four hours getting ready and meditating.

By the time I got to Elizabeth's, I was living in another world in my mind completely. I remember very little from the night's conversation because I was so caught up in what was going on in my head. When I first got there though and saw that Barrie was wearing a Stevie Nicks' t-shirt, I was certain I was right. Witches.

It was also a full moon that night, a fact I'd looked up to verify the seance status. Elizabeth's dog was excited to see me, excited as she is to see most people I now know, but that night, it seemed as if her dog was trying to tell me something. What, I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to be another sign.

I do remember Barrie joking at one point about Elizabeth attracting crazy people, and I emphatically agreed. Maybe, a part of my brain knew how unstable I was at that point.

Barrie talked about her book, which happened to be about her own bout with psychosis, and they both spoke of another writer who seemed unhinged on social media, perhaps facing a nervous breakdown.

"She's going to need some time off work," Elizabeth said.

"Yeah, maybe months," Barrie agreed.

I assumed they were talking about me. At one point, I bummed one of Elizabeth's menthol cigarettes and smoked it standing half-inside, half-outside her back door. She later told me I simply seemed socially awkward, which is not far from my normal self. I guess I seemed somewhat normal despite having no clue what we were talking about. I just kept waiting for a seance that would never happen.

Finally, around ten, I decided it was time for me to leave. I said goodbye and got into my car, staring at the big, full moon, wondering what message I'd missed, what signal I'd gotten crossed. I drove home but wasn't tired. I took a shower where I lay in the tub while the shower ran over me. Mike came in to check on me, and I made him hold my hand. "I'm freaking out," I told him.

“What’s wrong?”

I couldn’t explain myself.

I decided that since dancing had seemed to help me the night before, I would try it again, so I went into the basement and danced until I was burning up. I tore off my clothes and lay down naked on the carpeted basement floor. Mike tried to reason with me, to figure out what was wrong with me, when I realized I hadn't stayed until midnight. Seances definitely happened at midnight. Maybe I'd missed it. Maybe I could still make it. I checked the time. It wasn't yet midnight. I ran up the stairs and nearly out the door before Mike stopped me. I had been fully prepared to run naked to my car and make the drive back to Elizabeth's.

Luckily, Mike was able to convince me to stay with another shower. I felt like a fool in the rain as I sat under the shower head. By now, Mike was tired, but I wasn't at all. Before, I'd described myself as manic as a joke, but until this night never quite got what that really meant. In the shower, I screamed about the end of the world, about rape and murder while shifting between crying and laughing hysterically.

“What are you talking about?” Mike asked, his expression filled with worry.

“The Rolling Stones song.”

“Please, you’re not making any sense. Did you take something?”

“No,” I said. I wasn’t lying, but he didn’t believe me.

Mike was beyond concerned by this point, but having no idea what he was up against, thought he'd convinced me to get some sleep. I lay in bed next to him, trying to fall asleep and failing.

At some point in the night, I realized that I must be the dancing sort of witch, someone that could magically change things with dance, and I had a feeling I would need to be dancing soon. I snuck out of bed and finished fixing the clock. I added batteries. Then I set it in our living room bay window, with the hour hand at three, not because it was three, but because I'd heard it in The Shins song that had played the night before.

Then I pulled all of our glasses out of the cabinet and filled them with water and began placing them around the house, some upstairs, some downstairs, everywhere within reach so that when I would inevitably have to dance, I would be able to stay hydrated.

Finally, I lay back in bed and tried to sleep, but couldn’t. With the early morning hours came a little sense. I realized that if Mike found the glasses all over the house, he would surely think I was losing it, so I got up and collected all the glasses I'd filled and dumped them back out before he woke, hiding the evidence in the dishwasher. I didn’t need him worrying more than he already was.

 

Monday: At the Crack of the Clock

Monday morning, I hadn't slept, and I didn't bother to clock into work. Instead, I texted Stephanie. Call off work and come bake these muffins with me! I sent her a muffin recipe I wanted to try. I hadn’t eaten much in the past few days, but I found I wasn’t that hungry either. I just needed something to do.

Mike was trying to work from home though distracted and probably tired himself. He still had no clue what was going on with me, but I’d lied and told him I'd called off sick. I was acting somewhat normal, so he let it go.

Until I became convinced that people were coming over for a dance party, in part because I'd texted some of my friends to come over and dance, including Elizabeth. When she suggested we hang out another day, I replied, No, today! I lay in the basement, breathing heavily under blankets, insisting hysterically that soon people would show up, that soon our basement would be filled with friends who were here for a dance party.

Those friends didn't show, and that's when my mania began to turn dark. I was confused. I'd read all the signs, and everyone else knew what to do. They should be coming over. Or I was all wrong. Maybe, I'd been all wrong the whole time.

I checked my clock. It had been moving overnight, and before I'd believed I was moving it by dancing. Now, all of a sudden, it seemed ominous. Maybe the only way to turn back time, as I'd been trying to do, was to break the clock, like the Mad Hatter in the Donovan song. So I picked the clock up and headed to the kitchen where I dropped it on the laminate flooring. My concrete clock shattered into pieces and instead of feeling better, a feeling of terror washed over me. I wasn't supposed to break the clock. The clock was our only hope, and I'd just destroyed it.

"No, no, no, no, no!" I cried while sweeping up the clock's remnants.

Mike found me sobbing in the living room. I was watching music videos on YouTube, Our House by Madness, End of the Line by Traveling Wilburys, and others, and in all the videos, videos I'd seen before, faces now scowled back at me, angry, pissed off. I'd screwed up royally.

Mike called my sister, who came over shortly after. They both were now adamant about getting me to the hospital, so naturally, I saw them as the enemy. As I faced off against them and their misunderstanding of the situation, I began to feel the weight of what I'd done, what I'd messed up, which in my mind, was apparently, the world.

My sister tried to compromise with me. If I would try and get some sleep, we could skip the hospital. I agreed. She found me in bed wearing a Mr. Robot jacket and sunglasses with my headphones on. Tom Petty was making me feel worse about my decision to break the clock with the song Into the Great Wide Open. I felt like the “rebel without a clue.”

“Maybe you should turn the music off,” Steph suggested.

“I can’t.”

Finally, defeated, I agreed to ride along with them to the hospital, still convinced that I could talk them out of getting me checked out by a doctor.

I pulled on my winter hat and followed them to my sister’s car where I sat in the backseat. The closer we got to the hospital, the more I felt wrong about the whole situation. “Guys, I’ll be fine. Let’s go back.”

“But you agreed to get checked out,” Steph said. “Let’s at least do that.”

I would sit back quietly in agreement until a few minutes later. “Guys, I’m feeling fine now. We don’t need to go. We can’t afford the ER.” I was using my best reasoning skills in those moments of clarity. Somehow, they convinced me to stay the course.

As we walked into the ER for what would be the first of many hours that night, I stared at all the disappointed faces. Everyone there hated me. Everyone there knew I'd screwed up. Before, everything I’d done had seemed right. Now, it all seemed wrong. Besides, I had blue eyes. I was obviously the bad man, according to The Who.

Later, Mike would text Elizabeth from my phone, asking if I’d taken anything or if I’d seemed strange the night before. Still trying to figure out what had happened, he would go on a wild goose chase looking for answers while I was stuck in the hospital’s psych ward being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

 

Outro:

The other day, while working on my novel about psychosis, I wrote a sentence that I recognized immediately as a direct line from my subconscious to the paper I wrote on. "Maybe, no matter what I tried, I was destined to screw up." This, my ultimate fear, was the defining factor of my first, and now second, hyper manic episodes, this unhealthy need to fix everything with a needling suspicion that I can't fix anything, least of all the world.

It took a stay in a psychiatric facility, some heavy-duty meds, the help of doctors and therapists, and a support group, but I'm finally in what I would call real recovery. But more helpful than any of that has been the unquestioning love and support of my friends and family, who until they read this, never knew the full story of what was going on in my mind in those intense days.

Friendship. Community.

It seems whoever that messenger was that inhabited Drew the night of his bachelor party was right after all.