Chapter 8

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Rabbits do not name the stars…

“So how are you?” You’re going to miss the point.
“I’ve been walking this week.”
“How was that?”
“At sunrise.”
“Did you walk somewhere specific?”
“No. Just around the neighbourhood.” The rabbit hasn’t returned. Expected, but disappointing. Its disappearance is an event both marked and indistinct, significant and forgettable, like the death of an idea that was never born and now will never be realised. I can’t understand what any of it means, so instead I smile at you.
“Is there anything particular you would like to talk about today?”
“Today I came across a plaque or book or magnet or something in a bookstore and printed on it were the words, ‘Shoot for the moon. At least if you miss you’ll land among the stars.’ The generic nature of the statement aside, I was appalled by the inaccuracy. The moon is much closer to the Earth than even the nearest star. Best case scenario, if you shoot for the moon with lofty dreams and miss because you failed to account for all sorts of physics, you will become trapped in a low earth orbit where you might be rescued, though survival is highly unlikely. Worst case scenario, you will plummet back the Earth and greet Death over a breakfast of pancakes or you will float aimlessly through the dark void of space between stars until you die of asphyxiation. And technically, we are already among the stars, so why risk shooting for the moon in the first place?” There’s a hint of a simper betraying itself at the upturned corners of your not too thin lips. I shouldn’t be looking at your lips.
“Maybe the point then is since there’s nothing to lose, as no matter where you are you will be among the stars, then it can’t hurt to challenge yourself to do something new.”
“It can hurt. If you miss, like I said.” I saw you, today, and turned away. You were walking down the hospital hallway towards the clinic as I was headed towards the washroom. I had hoped this would happen, that you would see me and smile. Instead, I turned around and walked the other way, not able to bring myself to hope for the smallest sign of recognition from you. The pain of rejection would have been far too great to even consider the possibility you would acknowledge me with even artificial fondness. There was no way to avoid you seeing me, but I did my best to relieve you of the obligation of exchanging empty pleasantries with me. My fear now is that I made the wrong decision, that you saw me see, you saw me turn away, that you did want to see me and I rejected you. I rejected you.
“There is something to be gained from every life event, even the ones perceived to be failures.” If I fail, I die. You’re right. There is something to be gained.
“At any rate, it upset me.” I had to leave the store since, once I noticed the plaque, I became inundated, in a hostile manner, by sentimental banalities decorating every calendar and notebook in the store. If this is the world I am supposed to conform to in order to survive, I look forward to my eventual death.
“Has anything else been upsetting you this week?” Everything upsets me all of the time.
“Nothing specific. I tried to read a book.”
“Which book?” What difference does it make?
“The Plague.”
“An interesting, existential choice of a story. What did you think of it?”
“I couldn’t really read it. I recognised the words, and it shouldn’t have been difficult to read, but I didn’t understand them. I remember there was a lot of blood. I liked that. And somebody said something about death being ‘the right to disappear definitively.’ I don’t understand why I can remember that.”
“Death continues to play a significant role in your life. The statement most likely resonated with your attempts to withdraw yourself from life, literally and socially.”
“It is appealing.”
“What is appealing?”
“That not only can I disappear, but that it’s a right.” Instead of a conviction of insanity.
“It is your right. There’s nothing to prevent you from doing something like moving to the woods to live as a hermit.”
“I’ve actually thought about that.”
“And?”
“There are things preventing me.”
“What things.”
“Finances. I need to be able to buy a cabin and food and other supplies. I wouldn’t be able to go to school, not that I can now anyway.”
“So there are particular comforts you desire that would be less easily attained by living in isolation?”
“It’s not about the comforts. It’s that I wouldn’t be able to be the person that I want to be out in the middle of nowhere. Yet, here where I’m surrounded by people I detest, I don’t want to be the person I want to be.”
“What type of person do you want to be?” Someone more like you.
“I don’t know anymore. I’m very confused. All I ever wanted to do was go to school and work.”
“Isn’t that what you are doing?”
“No. School is over. Forever. I failed so miserably I can’t continue. Same with work.”
“But there are other options available to you in both work and education. The local colleges offer all sorts of professional certificates.”
“I thought about working in a morgue, but at the level I could get a job at, I would be bored within six months. That’s sad.”
“What’s sad?”
“That even death could bore me.”
“What do you think is limiting you in achieving the previous ideals you set for yourself?”
“I can’t do math anymore. I cut myself. I talk to myself. I see things that aren’t really there.”
“Those are all symptoms. You may have to do some reorganising of your professional life, but these are all limitations that can be overcome.”
“It doesn’t feel like it.” The damage is permanent. This is what I have amounted to, an illiterate, uselessly educated, and decrepit semblance of a person.
“Once you start doing the things you want to be doing, you will start to feel it. It may take some time. In the beginning, you might not feel anything at all. But the more you work at it, the more it will come, until you won’t have to work at it at all in order to recognise the achievability of your goals.”
“So where do I start?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. All I’ve ever wanted to do is work.”
“So get a job.”
“But I’m not qualified anymore for the jobs I want.”
“Then start somewhere else while you work on re-building your qualifications.”
“What if I can’t?”
“Can’t what?”
“What if I can’t go back to being what I was?”
“Then you’ll be something else.” I’m not sure I want to be anything else.
“Can I be a rodeo star?”
“There might be some special skills involved with that you would need to develop. Do you know how to wrangle a calf?”
“My speciality will be a new game. I’ll call it, ‘Pimp My Pig.’”
“You’ll have to fill me in on the details of that next time. I hope this week offers you opportunities to pursue your farming sport dreams.”
“I’m sure it will. Thanks.”

……….


I was lying in bed. I wasn’t tired, but it was ten o’clock at night and since I usually wait all day for ten o’clock to come, as this seemed the earliest normal hour I could retire, I excitedly dressed myself in my pyjamas and crawled into bed. Given that I wasn’t the least bit sleepy, I tried to read myself to sleep, but I found I was reading too fast and missing words and paragraphs. The story just couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with me. When I started erratically flipping the pages and then tearing them out, it occurred to me to put the book away.

I thought I heard a noise in the kitchen. It was probably just my cat or I fabricated the sound to give myself an excuse to get out of bed. Of course, by the time I got to the kitchen, I had forgotten all about the mysterious noise. Since I was out of bed anyway, it only made sense to turn on the stereo. Something mellow, I told myself, to help me sleep. But before that, a little bit of fun music. I told myself, just one song, then I’ll change the music to Chopin, which always helps me sleep.

One favourite pop song, accompanied by singing and dancing, became another favourite and another with more singing and more dancing. This went on well into the middle of the night, with periodic breaks of lying on the floor, my heart beating too fast from the dancing and my throat too sore from the singing.

It was during one of these rests, which were not remotely restful but only slowed the movement of my body to a shake, that I remembered I was supposed to be in bed reading (I thought I was supposed to be reading; I had completely forgotten about Chopin). Since I wasn’t able to focus my attention on taping the few pages back into the book I had been reading in proper numerical order (the thought of the mundane task of counting whole numbers was insufficient to hold my attention. And, I was slightly afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it, 1-2-?), I retrieved a new book from the shelf in the living room.

There were a lot of books on the shelf, a lot of choices, a lot of decisions to be made, and I couldn’t make one. So, I closed my eyes, turned myself around in three circles, and fell down. Once I had finished laughing at myself, I pushed myself up off the floor and stood, again, in front of the bookshelf. I closed my eyes, didn’t spin, reached out my hand and pulled out a book.

It was a book of poetry. Thinking this would be ideal, stanzas short enough I could read an entire poem, I opened the book to somewhere in the middle. Two lines into the first poem, I grew bored, so I closed the book and opened it to another random page. This time, my attention was captured.
I read the poem aloud over and over while pacing through the house. I was determined to remember it. Doubting my capacity to recall a single word later, despite my constant and often dramatic recitations, I concluded it had to be written down. Only it had to written in a place where I would notice it, because not only might I forget the poem, I might forget I had read it and recorded it.

I opened my purse with the intention of retrieving for a pen. My purse was as chaotic and disorganised as my mind, filled mostly with old tissues and candy wrappers, and the difficulty of a methodical search was testing my patience. Dumping the contents onto the floor, the first object my eyes landed on was a lipstick. I uncapped the tube and twisted the bottom to determine what shade it was. Red. Perfect.

Then I began writing. I nearly ran out of lipstick before I had filled the large mirror above my couch with the lyrics. But it was done and it was beautiful. I had saved myself from forgetting. This calmed me enough that at three am, I could at least lie in bed with my eyes closed, even if I couldn’t sleep.

I finally did fall asleep as the sky outside my bedroom window began to lighten with the rising of the sun. A few hours later, I rose, and in my groggy state I hadn’t yet recalled the events of the previous night. However, when I walked into the living room to be confronted with Keats scribbled in large, red letters on my mirror, I couldn’t not remember. That had been the point, to not be allowed to forget.

Reading the words, I began to cry. This wasn’t a happy poem. But I was happy when I wrote it, wasn’t I? I had woken up to a mysterious poem written by a mysterious person who I wasn’t entirely sure was me. It was like staring at a message left by some time traveller from the future. Maybe it was a warning. Or a prediction. Whatever it was, it was important. It was important enough that I felt obliged to let it remain inscribed on the mirror instead of washing it off.

Three days I spent in the company of Keats. I analysed every word, every combination of words, every punctuation, every pause. When I was certain the poem had been ingrained in my memory and fully conceived, I washed the lipstick off the mirror, because I wasn’t crazy and only crazy people write cryptic messages to themselves on household objects. I would wash myself of insanity with Windex and paper towels. It was that simple.

Except it wasn’t that simple. Most days during that week, I oscillated between exhilarating highs and debilitating lows, with no less then four mood shifts each day. At times, I would swing from one polar extreme to the other within minutes. There I was, one minute, running laps around the outside of the house, barefoot, unable to contain my ecstasy at every sensation passing through my body. Chilled grass lawn, bumpy cement sidewalk, pumping muscled legs. And in the next minute, I was back in the house lying crumpled on the floor, crying with such viciousness I was soon dry heaving from the effort.

With each sudden drop in mood, I folded into myself, bringing my knees up to my chest in anticipation of the imminent crash. It doesn’t matter how I prepare myself, the impact is always devastating. There is no object, real or imaginary, I have found to brace myself against that can withstand the force of the shadows moving into me, coursing through my bones in a chain reaction of invisible pain. When it happens suddenly like this, not even Laura can reach me. She and Kayla and everything cease to exist, replaced by the blinding darkness that lives in my head.

Eventually, my body exhausts itself, drained of energy, and I fall into a disturbed sleep wherever I lie, incapable even of lifting my body off the floor and walking to bed. After a few hours of rest, just enough to keep me from slipping into complete exhaustion, the uncontrollable cycle begins again. After a few days, the enjoyment of the highs wears off completely as I have learned, but will forget again, that each one will be followed by a major depressive episode, the end of which, unlike the mania, is always unforeseeable.