failed cento in an attempt to make sense
i see now what it looks like to knock headfirst into you over and over, expecting my head not to hurt.
i was diagnosed in february 2015. that summer, i listened to the song “addicted to love” up and down the paris metro’s line 9. natalie portman had been the face of miss dior for five years. against the backdrop of glossy red lips, i flew through the tunnels and corridors singing
your lights are on, but you’re not home / your mind is not your own
i was addicted—
the most accessible of metaphors, what one reaches for when one is trying to say something just beyond the limits of language—
before paris, i left a relationship. i plunged—
my best friend at the time said, you seem so stable. you’re handling it so well.
stable, yet
incapable of getting out of bed or making coffee or putting clothes on, somehow still desperate to be desired—
i don’t know how anyone missed that.
the moment one chooses a person, the relationship alters.
i moved to new york four years after paris. i lived in a POC co-op and had to decide if i should extend the lease after my sublet.
two months later i received an email: in seventy days, we will not be re-signing your lease.
there’s a playful comparison to addiction in “addicted to love.”
when i rediscovered the song after moving to new york, a miss dior perfume ad was all over youtube. every time i tried to watch a video, natalie portman drove wildly through pink smoke, argued, kissed, and threw pink roses at a man.
is there a way to talk about infatuation without wildness?
at the end of that november, i wanted to give up my acquired bliss in new york to go back to massachusetts.
the man i was trying to build something with still lived there. he often called me obsessive and difficult to love.
i threw myself forcefully into a wall,
or made an attempt at rescue, like pumping oxygen from my own mouth hoping to revive a dying structure.
sometimes life makes the decision for you.
a couple sharing their best advice for marriage:
every day we wake up and choose to be together. that’s what gets us through the years and years and decades and into a lifetime. it doesn’t matter that we are raising children together. we choose to be here.
if one has to decide every day whether to extend a lease, one won’t paint or buy flowers.
my last apartment in college, my best friend and i lived in a suite. she vacuumed every two weeks before her girlfriend came over. i kept all my empty wine bottles in the window. we decided it would be ours. we decorated every inch. it was the most perfect picture of domestic bliss i had ever lived in. we loved that little space. we loved it down to the susan sontag on the bathroom door:
what i have to get over: the idea that the value of love rises as the self dwindles.
which of my selves is the one dwindling?
by june of the year i was diagnosed, i was manic again.
i found a french boy on tinder and wrote him a series of mad love letters that i left outside his house. i had a friend translate them into french for me. i wrote him a poem characterizing myself as a photographic negative,
inching toward color as he slept next to me.
by july, i had met an american in paris and convinced myself i was going to move to colorado. we drunkenly made out by the seine, fuelled by my love for a new york times column he had written at the beginning of the year.
i never saw the stained-glass windows of sainte-chapelle that summer—
but i remember one afternoon by the seine, with our legs hooked over the river bank, the sunset lighting our faces into blown glass. everything was perfect,
i was soaring.
in late august, i started lithium again.
in the miss dior ad, natalie portman, in a navy dress, jumps off the end of a pier into the ocean with her arms over her head.
how often i have been as unmoored.
each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous, but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
one of the first things my therapist told me: the capacity for love does not die.
it just keeps hoping, leaping—and at the very edge of drowning, water sputtering from its mouth.
what would you tell yourself at the start of our marriage?
hold on.
i read a folktale once where a young maiden, janet, falls in love with the fairy knight tam lin. when she tries to win him from the fairy queen, the queen turns him into a lizard, a snake, a bear, a lion, a red hot iron, then a burning coal. he strikes her with his tail, scratches and burns her, but the only way to rescue him is to hold on.
in every version of the story, she never lets go.
i said to him—whatever this morphs into, whatever i morph into,
hold onto me
until one of my selves emerges again.
the month i met the man who called me difficult to love, i sat on the toilet every day staring at excerpts from susan sontag’s journals:
i’m only interested in people engaged in a process of self-transformation.
when i first met him, he said he wanted to grow every day. he said he was engaged in the process of self-betterment.
i was busy holding myself down to keep from transmuting.
i should have left the first time he called me child. or at least the first time he blocked my number after a fight.
if someone loves you, they need to be able to see you
you need to hide yourself somewhere where you can still be seen while backlit.
like the moon.
the moon, no matter which lunar phase it’s in, no matter how skinny it’s shaved itself or how round it’s puffed itself, is still the moon.
he never changed after all his iterations.
a reddit advice thread tells me love like that isn’t found. it’s built. how many perfect, decorated temples did your ancestors stumble across? no, they found a good level spot, maybe some water nearby, and said here. we can build something here.
i want to build something with you, i told him when we met.
as if cement and brick is enough to revive a structure collapsing at the base.
virginia woolf asked in one of her letters, how far do feelings take their color from the dive underground?
the months where i see light as individual colors, i see the flecks of color in everyone’s eyes.
for years, i demanded every man in the room be attracted to me when I walked in—
with my lack of inhibition and knowledge of touch.
sex overflowing past containment.
after my mania abated, i couldn’t remember what drove me to become involved with the french boy and the american in paris.
obsession is mania, or maybe just a need to latch onto someone.
were any of those feelings real?
what is the reality of any feeling?
love is a chemical imbalance, too.
in the “addicted to love” video, robert palmer stands in front of his band of models dressed in a white shirt and tie. nobody in the top 40 carried themselves like palmer.
the way he dressed in the videos was the way he dressed all the time. and there was no pretense; he was very comfortable in his own skin. he’d come to the studio dialed into his double-breasted suit and proper tie.
in college i was known for my outfits. i was a car accident in a fur coat at home depot.
once, at the peak of my mania, i wore a tight metallic skirt, fishnets, and fur to buy coffee at nine in the morning.
even on the days i felt like flinging myself over a railing, i put on eyeliner.
i’m bipolar. new diagnosis, but i don’t think it applies—i said one afternoon to a new friend, eating ice cream by the seine.
you seem pretty stable to me.
stable—
by winter in new york, i moved to a new apartment.
i did not move back to massachusetts.
in the dior ad, there are several shots of natalie portman running away from her lover: in their house while dressed only in a white button-down, in a dress on the beach, shot at chest level, and then from above, her footsteps a long trail in the sand. these are placed next to moments of stillness: lifting the sheets to look at the camera like a lover, nose buried in a man’s shoulder, both of them in each other’s arms at the back of a bus as some train caterpillars along, visible through the back window.
you like to think you’re immune to the stuff.
i used to think that i did impulsive things when manic.
at least, in some mixed state of staring at the ceiling unable to move while ideating my dentist.
where does the chemistry end and where do i begin?
i am the least difficult of men. all i want is boundless love.
it’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough.
four years into my diagnosis, “addicted to love” came on shuffle in the middle of a new york city snowstorm.
it had been months since i left the man who told me i was obsessive, difficult to love. i was fixated on someone i’d just met.
maybe it’s the mania. or maybe i’m just impulsive as a person, i told my therapist.
i think they’re both the same. they’re both just you.
my therapist asks me when i last felt like myself—
not who i am in love with each of these men. rather, in the still place in the middle of motion, a singular me is supposed to exist.
i take a different shape every month.
i don’t know how anyone can love them all.
if one titrates away the madness of love, how much of what’s left is just madness?
in that new york city snowstorm, i sang along to every word of “addicted to love.” the song softened against my tongue. bipolar. i traced the edges of that once sharp word.
like love, or mania, the journey is in the falling. i watched the snowflakes melt in my empty palms, disappear.
east 4th and lafayette held its breath.