more than once, i've asked my mother why the dead are the only ones who are afforded peace. she tells me the same thing every time - if you try hard enough, work smart enough and torture yourself enough in life, soon it'll all pay off.
i ask her what soon means and she doesn't answer - she goes back to her book or her tv show or that comfort song she does karaoke over sometimes (it's a prince song, if anybody asks). my mother can so easily put things from her mind, but here i am sitting on the sofa wondering when the fuck soon will happen.
and then i am sixteen and the word swallows me whole and puts me on strings; like a marionette the world makes me dance a jig at the base of its belly. i dance so hard that every footfall reverberates through the centre of the earth and i am vibrating, so fast and sudden that i am released like a breath of fresh air or a mouthful of projectile vomit - it doesn't matter which.
i spend six months in bed wondering when the fuck soon will work its magic on me. i sleep like the dead, think so hard on this elusive soon that eventually i am convinced that it is my own soul that exists as the root of all evil. fresh tears and mucus and suddenly everything is covered in the stuff - my pillow, my quilt and sheets, the notebook i try to scribble homework into.
when i am seventeen it hits me so hard i can't breathe. i find myself passed out on the bathroom floor, staring down at myself from the corner of the ceiling. sleeping like the dead is for the dead and dying because now i cannot sleep, i can never sleep. weakness will make that soon arrive far too quickly and there is so much and so little to do all at once.
i spend a week straight wide awake until finally, sixteen songs, three sculptures of myself in the nude and three burned bridges later, i pass out on top of a man on the subway. he is clutching the same pole as me and i'm the root of all evil, remember?
he yells at me to, and i quote, "get the fuck off him before he calls the cops". i say "sorry", i cry hysterically, and then i skip school for a week straight to reward myself for...what, exactly? it's hard to tell. i'll go back soon, i tell myself. soon.
eventually a week turns into a month and a month turns into a year and it is six o' clock in the evening and i am eighteen years old, riding the subway to get my diploma after work. i think the beast has swallowed me whole because i am still wondering what soon is and when it will arrive, but i know this much - i am in the belly of the beast.
i watch the matrix six times in one night and my mother bangs on the wall we share, begging me not to watch the same stupid scene that i love so much. "turn it off!" she begs, but i am so cozy in my blankets that i don't want to grab the remote. sleep is for the dead or dying but it'll take me soon enough.
"soon," i call back. soon.
this is a poem/prosey bit i wrote on the subway one day about how it feels in my head (for me) to have bipolar. also, a lot of this is just straight up recounting actual events.
