Bipolar and Motherhood

I spend my life looking in at other people’s windows.

I used to walk. For hours on end, every time I found myself some corner of time somehow unaccounted for, at the early hours of dawn, when I woke and didn’t have to be anywhere else, I walked.

I lingered as long as I could on windows I liked best – the soft light bathing the plush carpet in a stranger’s living room, their manicured lawn softly breathing in response to the steady skittle of their sprinklers coming to life, I squint my eyes and try to see through the mist – and try to discern book titles from the wooden shelves that line their wall – most often, when the time is right – there are gentle murmurs from the dancing glow of a television screen with the volume turned low, just muted, quick flashes of images across a beige wall where a still body lay crumpled against the window, nestled in a couch, facing away from me, I imagine an empty smile creeping on their lips as their lids flutter in response to the noise – even in sleep, we are parasocial – so intertwined in each other are we that a stranger’s voice coming from a screen miles away can still touch us in our sleep, stir us into comfort as we endlessly seek what’s familiar – comfort over notoriety, over experience, over the unknown – choosing the TV and a book over and over again instead of a body to sleep against, on the slight off chance that we wake and find our bedside empty.

I’m dying to know other people’s lives.

Such morbid curiousity to consume the secrets and the banalities of another’s daily living which I can never seem to satisfy. I just want to know — how do other people spend their precious minutes, their endless days? What motivates them? What makes them wake up in the morning and jump into their day, so sure, so confident that anything they do makes a difference anywhere? What kind of laughter comes out of you? Does it start shy at first, a sniggle here and there, until you lose all guard somehow and you let loose, a full-on guffaw with your mouth open wide, tongue out, eyes squeezed shut, holding on to the folds of your belly as if to prevent it from imploding, tears rolling down the sides of your cheeks? What makes you laugh like that? And what makes you force a giggle out of your throat, a lie for the benefit of others, before you stop, cover your mouth and turn away, afraid of getting caught?

How are you able to stop crying? How do you read or see something on your feed about the world that is undeniably true, and you feel a kind of sickness that starts at the base of your throat – threatening to spread across your chest, your shoulders, down your spine – if you continue to think about this it will wrench you apart, it will drown you in shudders and you know you’ll find yourself lost, wading on your own in the land of tears – so you take a deep breath, lean back ever so slightly, and swallow it all down – whatever that was, leave it buried – and just like that, a maneouvre you’ve perfected so well you are barely even conscious of doing it, you continue scrolling? How many times a day do you do that, my darling? And why won’t you let yourself cry and feel for the world that is crumbling to death before your eyes?

I want to pick up the threads of your thoughts – the ones you deny entrance, the ones you push past, the ones that get left behind as soon as you allow cognitive dissonance to reign. I want to give them a stage. I want to shine all the light I can gather from all these silent houses – the glow from your televisions, the sunlight that enters the shades of your windows in that magical in-between time we let pass by without a moment’s notice – sunrises and sunsets ignored – miracles for everyone only so few get to witness in their lives — that dim from the lamp at the corner of your room you’ve forgotten was left on – I want to collect and focus them all on these buried thoughts – to intensify their state, to give them space, and a mic to magnify their voice.

Will you let them speak? Will you listen no matter how uncomfortable, how miserable it makes you feel? This is the truth of you darling, the truth of us, isn’t it beautiful?

I find it so beautiful, so enchanting, your unfiltered thoughts ripe, yourself exposed, dissected, spread wide open, naked and vulnerable for the taking — they tell me this is inappropriate, this is unjust, this is tawdry and inelegant, and so, so cheap but I swear to the gods, darling, I’ll bare myself raw, kneel naked into the trench with you, I’ll yield, back our bodies against the wall and retreat no further, together we can split ourselves apart for everyone else to cannibalize and consume for their own satiety, unknowing are they that this famine is infinite, and the only way out is our complete and absolute surrender to each other, no borders barred.

But I have to be polite, and decent, and well-dressed and well-behaved so I dial my curiosity down and I quell my desire – I can’t know everybody, and that’s okay, I have to be somehow okay with that. Not everyone is as in love with the world as we are with each other and that’s okay, it’s ugly but it has to be fine, somehow. Even the people I think I know will lie to me and I won’t ever know, won’t ever know them until they choose to reveal themselves to me, or leave me to speculate their actions, their thoughts, forever wondering why with no answer nor clue left behind for me to find. Somehow, I have to be okay with that. To live with that. I have to be okay with whatever window people give, with the shortest reel they decide to play for me, and I have to believe in it, believe that there is all there is to it, I have seen all of them, I am supposed to find satisfaction in this and I have learned over time to agree, to acquiesce to the role they have given me to play, to commit and commit and build fences around ourselves to keep ourselves imprisoned to the roles we are supposed to play, and to smile at each other with those vacant, empty smiles while our eyes dance yearning to yield so much more but there are no more words, no words exist to allow ourselves this freedom, and our hearts continue to beat furiously, so loud all we can see and taste is blood, pounding and drumming as it screams in perfect silence.