MY MANIC OPUS
— complete —
(Sometimes my life is like this and it is desperate and beautiful)
Mania requires music that speaks only to you.
Music that vibrates along your jawline, shooting lyrical echoes to the back of your throat as they cut lattice lines down your spine.
Kinda like an animated xylophone in a cartoon from the 80s, oversized Glockenspiel mallets with gum drop tips clunking out a simple, comedic tune. Except with Mania the pace is reckless, the mallets hammer out chaotic sounds that wreak havoc in your too-tight chest.
Not enough room to direct the ricochet.
My Manic playlist rattles my teeth; my tongue clashes into my cheeks and nudges blood from my gums. The hollow of my throat is clogged with too much intoxicating noise.
The songs I savor on my iTunes playlist are played loudly and repeatedly.
Grimes first, Miike Snow up next, “What is Love” by Haddaway played six or seven times in a row, Kid Cudi “Pursuit of Happiness (Extended Steve Aoki Remix) feat MGMT and Ratatat”
LOUDLY
anything written by OK Go is sent spinning around my skull but it is never just the song — I always watch the music videos until my eyes flake desperate and dry -
then Toadies’ “Possum Kingdom” which I sing at the top of my lungs, followed by “Call” by Francesco Yates which makes me sway and slide and pull my hair out, and Sia is probably crazy like me — just look at her — I celebrate this revelation within myself as her music leaks through my keyboard -
and lastly “Malibu” by Hole, which isn’t exactly easy on the ears, but the lines stick in my ribs, snug like a life preserver…
“I can’t be near you, the light just radiates” — I AM THE LIGHT.
How did Courtney Love know? We haven’t met yet. I am so loud that my lungs rip right open but I don’t need to breathe or sing or even laugh because I feel everything at once in a way so elegant only Daft Punk’s electronic mashups understand.
The hairs on the back of my neck bristle and my eyes are dry and brittle because I’ve pried them open for three days straight.
Sleep is for the silent. I have too much noise in my ears.
Claire Elise Boucher aka Grimes sedates me with her music. I feel wild inside and my mind races with colorful ideas but I am stuck in my seat.
Lodged into this wooden chair, like my spine is a javelin — only seconds ago thrown in an arch through the clouds, piercing my ceiling, sliding cleanly into my skull, severing my sanity as it pins me to the ground.
I think about Phineas Gauge, cut quickly by a railroad iron and left for crazy — he died at 36 and I’m 31 — I have to be careful.
But what an attractive man, especially with one eye. Look him up, you’re welcome. But all I can do is cast my eyes towards the white painted ceiling overhead and let hot tears slither down my cheeks.
Grimes was going to be a neuroscientist until she was expelled from McGill University for making too much music. A busy little twinkling alien who really gets me.
And Kid Cudi has depression. I saw it in a Buzzfeed article so it must be true.
Someone tweeted this sentiment that I’m struggling to paraphrase — my mind is too busy whistling — “if this is the music he writes when he’s sick, I can’t wait to hear his work when he’s healthy.” But will I relate to a Kid Cudi that’s patched up?
I can’t even keep my own band-aids in place. My brain gets too wet and warm and they wriggle away. I’m allergic to the adhesive anyway; plastic sutures make my skin blister.
And Courtney Love didn’t commit suicide, her husband did, and when I’m MANIC as fuck I can’t remember his name because he doesn’t matter as much to me — I think about Courtney LOVE and how her daughter Frances Bean HATES her.
Pushing people away is a well-established characteristic of my disease.
BUT I FEEL SO GOOD when I pulsate and the music dissects and pricks apart the fleshy warm wiggling pile of pink pus in my head that I call a brain.
Quick hands wheedle pushpins into the part of the cerebral cortex that urges me to make bad decisions. Plotting out prime real estate in the gelatinous tissue, leaving place markers at the craziest parts so I can go back and poke them later, sell segments off to somebody. Combing through the goo, leaving thumb prints on the softest spaces in my skull, prying open the grey matter to see who else is creeping inside.
I feel feral and wonderful and I want to take a scissor to my hands because at this point in my Manic episode my blood must sparkle. My body is tense and I punch the floor, where I am slumped, because I fell from my chair — my skeleton forgetting how to keep me upright.
To my dismay I haven’t yet bloodied a single knuckle.
I’m not on drugs, I’m on Bipolar, and she is cruel, beautiful, and engineered to make me soar and crash for eternity.
Like a playlist set on an everlasting loop.
Twenty One Pilots calls their music Schizoid Pop and maybe that name is offensive but the lyrics sure are catchy as hell as I scream them into my fists. They do have a point.
And as Kehlani looks lovingly into the microphone and blasts her ballad “CRZY” right in its face, all I can say is that this anthem made her more of an “assassin,” confessing to all of us that “I go I go I go I go…” and everything she does she does with passion, killing them with compassion, and we both tried to kill ourselves.
What are the odds that she sees me through the speakers?
But somehow she knows I’m going going going going CRZY too. We are one in the same but her stomach is tighter and her tattoos send more of message. But it’s hard to decipher her designs over Google image. Maybe we will meet in real life and I will see the secrets inked in her neck tattoo.
I sing “Possum Kingdom” — “be my lover, be my lover” — and — “What is Love” — because what the fuck is (Courtney) LOVE if it isn’t this illness that worships me and then tries to kill me?
But I love my madness anyway. Isn’t love about forgiveness? I forgive you Bipolar. I love you Mania!
I feel like throwing up but I haven’t eaten food in days — my cheeks bleed where I’ve bitten them into swollen crusted cubbyholes. I taste like red salt and nobody loves me but my Mania. Every lyric makes sense and I am let down by real people who say real things off beat.
I just know that each artist left me a line scrawled in invisible ink that is dedicated just to me and it whispers my innermost thoughts and it flickers in the music videos that I drool over.
My Mania is delectable and these songs incite the fire in my mind, taunting my tantrum, and nothing will extinguish me because I can’t let it go.
Too stubborn to share my omnipotence. My jaw is locked territorially tight around my transcendent melodies.
Just one more listen to the playlist because I might have missed something crucial, critical, a key piece of my bloody mentally ill puzzle.
I push scissors into my skin to keep me real and on the floor and Sia shatters my skull with a waterfall of diamonds. I borrow perfect words from Francesco Yates, “I don’t ever want to be lonely with no one else,” and I try to sing them to my sweet Mania but she’s too busy choking the life out of me.
And before I pass out from electric livid bliss, before the sequined reaper looming over me kicks me in the chest with her iridescent spiked pearl boot, my favorite poet e.e. cummings reminds me of the verse he wrote especially for me, for situations like these,
“shake the mountains when YOU dance” and I tremble
with the ferocity of an infinite sickness and I laugh at my momentum which hurls my body into nothingness and maybe I’ll find my way back if I follow the trail of droplets of tears and blood and music that is growing fainter by the second, threatening to leave me behind in this disease.
But often times there is nothing I can do but pray someone fiddles with my volume.
Because my hands are pinned by Mania’s pearlescent shit-kickers as she spits psychosis down my swollen throat, a pink puffed aching tunnel that sang much too loudly, too desperately, too foolishly in an attempt to woo her.
A failed attempt to enchant her, capture her, make her mine.
And then Psychosis comes to stay and she whittles paper doll chains out of my brain and hangs them all around my psychiatrist’s office. Playful bloody madness dressed as delicate shapes slammed on his white walls. The stains set in and I just know insurance won’t cover it.
