RealMental

[This post is the kind that winds around itself and threatens to lose all who dare to follow.  I apologize, of course—but will try to bring it home.]

It starts—or ends—here, with a yellowing bruise on my hip the size of a half-dollar.  Unintentionally put there, a mistake that he didn’t realize he had caused.  If he had realized at the time, he would have switched his face immediately.  I’ve seen it a few times—a shoulder to the sternum or my hands contorted around my metal back—then the abrupt stop, the gasping gaping mouth.  The hands laid flat across my spine as I catch my breath.

***

Winter 2006—I was filling out one of those anonymous surveys on my stupid MySpace page.  I was supposed to be finishing a medical school application but was distracted.  By everything.

One of the questions asked, “What are you not?”  I was insanely jealous of the answer my friend Allison had put—it was so self-assured, so positive.  I thought for a few minutes before I answered.

A strong person, I wrote.

***

I was a feisty child, surrounded by rough-and-tumble brothers and built of a certain solid stock.  My body accumulated bruises and scars over the years—the gouge on my hand from a fight with my brother, the scars on my knees from rock climbing and dog bites, the permanently swollen knuckle and swan-necked finger that resulted from one memorable wrestling match, age 20, that required an entire month of PT to resolve.

But somewhere along the way, I lost that sense of fierceness.  I gave in to pushing touches and piercing glances.  Sucker-punched by words that were supposed to be compliments.  I felt so out-of-control.  So fucking weak.

“What are you not?”

“A strong person.”

***

I don’t know if he’ll ever fully realize how much he’s given to me.  There was just something about his constant challenges, the purposeful pokes that incite me.  There’s nothing like the feeling of an impending spar, the first things that make me stop and ball up my tiny fists.  I know I’ll never win—he’s much bigger and much stronger—but there’s something in the fight that thrills me.  There’s something about being pushed back and attacking again—raising my fists after hitting the floor, arching my back down and charging or kicking as I’m held above the floor.

I never had an older brother, but I imagine that this is what a childhood with one looks like.  There’s something brilliantly beautiful in the futility of it all.  There’s a certain passion that blushes up through me, that warms me up and makes me feel alive.  Alive and strong.

***

Sometimes, on Tuesday afternoons, I go to pilates class.  I’m not terribly good at it, but I am always inspired by the instructor.  She’s bubbly and thin, uses weird phrases for different muscles, and is unfailingly supportive.

So, one week, I push myself into a plank, and I hold there for a minute.  And she squats down beside me and places her hand on my back to steady me.

“Look!” she says.  “See how strong you are?”

And it hurts, but I nod and smile.

***

I will never feel invincible.  There is always something else, pushing and testing me.  There’s always a hurt or a need or an aching longing for something else.  There is perpetual stress, constant working and chronic exhaustion.  But on a Monday night, I spar in the living room of my best friend’s house, the room where I’ve been tossed to the floor and spear tackled onto the ottoman and dragged across carpet and picked up until I screamed in frustration.

It’s not until later that I notice my hip is in acute pain, throbbing from the force of being thrown sideways into a couch.  I realize that I didn’t notice it before because I was so engrossed in the fight, obsessed with picking myself back up and throwing myself back into a losing battle.  Over the next few days, a bruise blooms into the most lovely battle scar, a sore memento that I fawn and fret over.  That I’m proud of.

There are so many fights, you know—I fight to be treated fairly, I fight to get what’s mine.  I fight over silly things and important things, and I fight the world and myself equally.  And at the end of the day, worn out from fighting, I go to bed tired but filled.  Filled with a certain feeling of strength.

***

“What are you not?”

“A weak person.”

“Look at how strong you are.”

“I know.”

In that period of time I mentally call the Big Bad Hurt—April 2, 2006-December 2, 2007—I found myself in bed with a series of boys.  Always in bed, often through the night—but never sleeping.

Even after they would fall asleep—as they inevitably would—curled around me and snoozing like infants, I would lie awake for hours.  Crunched up in their arms, suffocating and guilty.  Hours and hours of staring at the ceiling, thinking too fast.

The mania didn’t help, as it never does.  It was an amalgam of factors, the natural loss of sleep I’d be getting when I was manic, added to the guilt and the suffocation.  I hate to be touched in my sleep and hate, even more, being cuddled when I’m tired.  A lifelong and unapologetic thumbsucker, I need to lie in a certain position to drift off.  But they never cared, never paid attention.  Just wrapped me up too tightly in their arms and dropped off, never caring if I joined them on that other side.

Except once, in the middle of the Big Bad Hurt—I got drunk in my house when my parents were away.  Joey and I weren’t “together”—we were on the break that would last from my birthday and for a little less than two weeks.  The same night I fell out of bed and he helped me back in.  Then let me turn on my side, like I prefer.  He didn’t wrap me up in octopus arms, but just let me be.  And calmly fell asleep beside me.

I woke up next to him the next morning, and I knew.  I knew that he was the one.  I knew that he was the person I was supposed to be with—after all, I’d fallen asleep with him.  Of all the boys I’d ended up in bed with, he was the only one who I could actually sleep with.

It takes a great deal of comfort, I guess, and a level of trust to fall asleep with someone.  With him, it was so natural, so unmanufactured.  I didn’t have to fake it with him. I never had to fake anything with him.

I was lucky, you know.  I was lucky that we made it through the Big Bad Hurt.  Truth be told, I’m lucky that he had the dedication to make it through.  That he stayed.

Every night, now, I get to drift off beside him, perfectly calm and sleepy.

And sometimes, when he’s staying at a friend’s house until late or staying up to play games on the computer, I fall asleep on his side of the bed, just so he’ll have to wake me up and move me over.  He wakes me up to move, and then I drop right back to sleep.  Just like then.  Just like always.  Perfectly calm.  Or, simply put, just perfect.

People don’t understand the ways that a chronic illness is different from an acute one.  It’s hard, until you’ve experienced it, to grasp the nature of the flux of day-to-day symptoms and management.  People don’t understand how well we have to know ourselves, how we have to track our changes.

We’re expected to be our own mind-readers, to know when things are moving up or down.  We keep journals and calendars and second-guess our feelings.  I try to stay ahead of myself, but sometimes it is only through the worn-out glasses of hindsight that I am able to say, man, I was crazy last week.

But even harder than keeping track of my own moods, I find, is knowing what to do when I realize that I am flailing or sinking or rising too quickly.  I can see that I need help, but I don’t know how to ask for it.  I never know how to ask for it.  I’ve tried, once or twice.  But I’m bad at being explicit—it always comes out jumbled and obtuse.  I can’t find the right words, even when I’m with my best friend or my psychiatrist.  I don’t know how to tell people that I’m hurting, that I need a rescue.

***

I’ve been at a conference all week.  On Monday, we arranged ourselves to have a picture taken.  Because I am short, I naturally got punted from the third row into the first.  There, I was placed beside an older man.  He turned to me and spoke with a European lilt, asked if our weather is always this nice in November.  I told him that is generally is, and we chatted further for a few minutes.  After the pictures were done, we started to walk away—he asked my name, and I looked down and commented, “Oh yes, I forgot to put on my name tag today.”

And he replied, “Oh, I couldn’t have seen it if you did.”  Then, he reassembled his cane, grasped the arm of a nearby man and walked off, yelling behind him, “Oh, I’m speaking tonight!”

***

He was amazing to watch; he started out his presentation by commenting on his blindness.  He has retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic degenerative disease.  He was diagnosed in his thirties with degenerating sight, and now can see almost nothing.

But more amazing to me than his adaptations and obvious intelligence—which were nothing less than incredible—was the ease with which he asked for aid.  He was unobtrusive and unapologetic—if he needed guidance, he simply asked for it.  I watched as he passed himself between colleagues, grasping for their arms with an ease that was simple and beautiful.

I wish for this ease; I covet it with the most jealous and evil parts of my soul.  I wish for the grace to ask for help, I wish for the suspension of ego that would allow me to say, “Here I am, lost.  Please take me somewhere else.  I need you to guide me.”

I yearn to someday be able to take someone’s arm and say “Please help.”  But more than that, I worry I will never be able to.  And that, I think, scares me more than anything else about my disorder.

When I look back [and really, even when I was in the moment], I was kind of crazy this week.  Real Crazy, like the kind of crazy that got me here in the first place.  For the same reasons.

Reasons like—a stressful presentation on two and a half hours of sleep, a test on about the same amount.  Our seven year anniversary, which I didn’t get to celebrate properly until last night.  And a cracked radiator on the boy’s car, a leftover surprise from his Seasonal Flu Dizziness Driving Adventure [which culminated in him rear-ending another car on his way home from work one evening].  It seemed like every day was designed to take it out of me.  It, I suppose, being my threadbare sanity.

If I were to be completely honest with myself [which I rarely am] and all of you [which I try to be], I would admit that I always exacerbate things by not working on them when I should.  I have a broken sense of urgency, replaced by too large a dose of inevitability.  Yes, it is coming soon, but I will inevitably have it done.  The two don’t connect in the proper time frame.  Or, possibly, I’ve always gotten it done, so there’s no need [so whatever part of my mind that controls that sort of thing says] to do it expediently.

So, I spend my nights before these big events—presentations, tests, the like—alternately catnapping on my couch, pounding caffeinated beverages and feverishly doing work.  It doesn’t bode well on the next day, when I’m worn out and worried that I’m not prepared.

Tuesday was such a day—filled with classes, one of which I was slated to do a presentation on the synthesis of a natural product peptide.  I had done a decent amount of reading and work the night before, but I still stayed up very late.  Chemistry doesn’t come as easily to me as it does to some of my classmates.  It doesn’t come as easily, even, as it once did.  I worked hard to prepare, working through breaks in the day of the presentation to finish.

And finally, it was done.  Over.  I had done well.  I could rest, my most stressful part of the day behind me.  I was looking forward to the end of the day, to seeing friends.  I breathing again.

Then, I picked up a paper and had an unexpectedly shitty grade.  I felt like a child who doesn’t understand the rules—how do you complete something when the rules are ill-defined.  I was confused and upset.

Then, my semi-boss sat down beside me—4:45 PM—looked me in the eye, and said “You’re not progressing as quickly as I would like.”  In response, I floundered around a response, then finally just started crying.  He beat a hasty retreat, said we would talk about it later.  I cried more, harder—cried in that way that I knew I wasn’t really crying about this incident.  Crying because I was tired.  Crying because sometimes the rules are too hard to understand.  Crying because it’s hard, goddammit.  Crying because I’m crazy, sometimes, and that makes me cry too.  Crying because I was embarrassed, mortified—that I’d somehow let him win by getting the best of me, making me look soft.  Crying because I was angry at him for making me feel like I’m proving someone else’s point, that women shouldn’t be in science or high stress jobs because it wears on their delicate souls.

So, I set about getting some digital comfort.  My closest labmate registered her sense of unfairness.  “Nobody makes you cry,” she told me.  My best friend asked if I needed him to do anything.  “Not now,” I answered, comforted by the knowledge that he would, if I ever asked.  I know he would.  Other friends, as they found out about the incident during the week, likewise registered outrage.  Even after it was over, even after I understood more what he was asking.

I remembered a similar incident, when I was in college and an RA.  I was accused—of all things—of having sex in my dorm room.  Which was against the rules—not explicitly, but tacitly, I suppose—for my small Christian college.  That had the same set of feelings, the obvious shame and exhaustion, of course, but also a feeling like I didn’t know the rules.  I hadn’t been having sex in my dorm, on purpose, because I felt like it was possibly inappropriate.  I was sexually active and in a monogamous relationship, but it was long-distance and those carrying-ons were usually, well, carried on elsewhere.  At the time, a couple of my friends who were fellow RAs pledged to quit their jobs if I lost mine.  But when the hatchet fell—and it did—they didn’t carry through.  Hemming and hawing, they found ways to renege.  Saying that they understood the decision.  Saying it wouldn’t change anything if they quit.  That feeling—that they’d pledged something and let me down, it stayed with me.  In a blink of an eye, I can conjure that feeling.  Of course, other friends offered up support, and I obviously made it through that extremely trying time.  But I was let down.  And that time in my life was the first I’d ever seriously questioned my sanity.  With all of the desperate feelings, literal months of crying–it was the first time I ever thought something could be terribly wrong.

But these days, let me tell you—I’ve assembled a crack team, a Sanity Squad that I would put up against any other.  I never question their commitment.  I know that they would go to bat, at risk of their own good standing.  I know that they would approach a man they’ve never met to tell him he was wrong.  I know they would do this for me.

I watch the meticulous ways they take care of me, stand to the side and watch as they open bottle after bottle and then hold out an arm to escort my wobbly ass down some steps.  They buy me meals when I’ve forgotten my wallet, drive my phone to me when I leave it in their car.  I’d do the same for them.  I do the same for them.

These are the people who’ve taught me—literally—about what it means to be a friend.  I’d like to think I learn from them, but most of the time I feel like they are so much better at it than I am.  I don’t know what to do with this type of love, with the intensity of our intimacy, our bowed heads and whispered voices.  They have me caught up in their gravity, or maybe the other way around.  Or maybe we’re all just magnets, caught up in each other.  Maybe it was bound to happen.  Maybe it was meant to be.

In any case, having lost most of the perceived secrets of the universe, I stumbled on this one.  That friends—if you let them, if you work at it, if you reciprocate—are the absolute difference.  The one thing that can turn a bad day on its head.  The one thing that makes you want to keep living, even when you’re giving up.  Some days, the only—ONLY—thing keeping me together.  I have a posse, goddammit.  Everything else—mean bosses, a shitty batch of brain chemicals, memories of lost friendships past—had better fucking beware.

“My shadow side, so amplified, keeps coming back dissatisfied—“

It’s starting to be autumn here—creeping, slowly but surely, through the windows and the trees.  Each morning is a little cooler, and it’s almost unnecessary to keep the air on at night.  I’ve picked back up the habit of leaving my car windows open when it’s too cold, blowing the heat on my feet so I don’t freeze up.  I remember starting this, in the almost-autumn of 2006.  A lot of things were starting then.  I was about to go completely crazy, and I didn’t know it yet.  I wouldn’t know until after the fact.

So the autumn brings the memories, brings them in viscerally.  As it gets colder, I will keep remembering.  I won’t stop.  I will try to, sometimes.  But they get stuck inside me, stuck on repeat.  They are skipping records, spinning in my abdomen.  The echo is enough to drive you crazy.

Or, at least, crazier than you are already.

They get exacerbated by new memories, by the phrases tossed around by friends.  One of my closest friends from medical school is on her psych rotation, and she had the distinct pleasure of doing a home visit for a man in an acute manic phrase.

“I know he’s sick,” she said, “but I couldn’t help thinking ‘This is someone I’d want to hang out with.’  He made us mix cds, and he was wearing these huge glasses.  He was…fun.”

I don’t want to be sarcastic, because I love her and, anyway, her perceptions give me new perceptions.  It’s like looking at someone looking into my past and describing me.  But still, in my head, I want to quip, real sardonic, like I am these days: “Fun…yeah, that’s one word to describe it.”

On bad bad days, when I’m beaten down and feeling miserable, I worry that I will never feel that euphoric again.  People want to be that, don’t they?  Euphoric?

[Hey all you bipolar people—let’s tell the world our secret.  Euphoria is unnatural.  The kind of happiness that shouldn’t exist, the kind that is only possible with spazzed-out neurons and illegal drugs.  It’s a dangerous feeling, in that you will always want to chase it.  Don’t you want to be happy?  What’s wrong with being happy?]

Not to leave out all the normal people.  Hey normal people, over here!  Welcome to my Mind Fuck.

Every day, I make the conscious choice to file my memories into piles and folders.  Memories of cheating, of lying and manipulating, of sleepless nights spent pounding coffee and writing plays, short stories, poetry—collate into folder marked “BAD.”  Memories of time spent getting out of that hole I’d dug myself, memories of therapy breakthroughs and the first time he said “I’m sorry,” after all that—pile overflowing the “GOOD” box.

But there’s always the shadow of everything that was.  Where do you file the memory of someone else putting on your motorcycle helmet because you always fuck it up, the conjoined memory of your hands in the air, 70 MPH on city streets at 4 AM [File it BAD, Jenny.  File it BAD.].  When you think about winding red ribbon around your favorite book and giving it to someone else—this book is about love, you think.  When you are crazy, you think you have the power to make everyone see everything—you think you can make people love you [FILE IT BAD, GODDAMMIT—DON’T THINK ABOUT IT—JUST DO IT].  Every moment when you felt beautiful or brilliant or sexy, every moment when you thought you were spinning the world with the electricity in your heart [BAD—BAD—BAD].  Everything you worry you will never feel again.

I put those things in the BAD folder, sure.  But the Shadow keeps wanting to pull them out.  So I re-file them, once or twice or a hundred times a day.  But sometimes I worry that the Shadow will pull them out, and that they’ll sit on the desk in the sorting pile while I stare at them.  That I won’t remember why they’re so bad in the first place.  That I’ll drop them somewhere else, or just pick them up and inhale their dusty pages.  That I’ll tumble into them, like some movie for children.  Except it’s not a game.  It’s my life.  It’s the life that I’ve put everything too.  It’s the whole life, everything I have to lose.

So, I focus on generating more memories, to hang on the wall over the GOOD box.  So I’ll remember:

-That I feel beautiful when I catch a glimpse of my eyes in my rearview mirror

-That I feel brilliant when I finally work out a mechanism, when I take something apart with my hands and put it back together, better than it was

-That I feel sexy when my boyfriend picks me up in the kitchen [though I’m wearing glasses and a pair of umbrella-print underwear, and I’ve got morning hair] and throws me onto our bed

-That every day, I get the chance to spin the world with the electricity in my heart.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it?  To be here, to be crazy or treated, to be in or out of your head, to be safe or dangerous and self-aware?  To watch yourself dip into insomnia, to take a pen in hand and scribble across paper, late at night.  To watch yourself move closer on the couch, catch yourself and move back away—to do this over and over again for the course of an evening.  Advance, riposte, retreat.

I’m back here, sitting happily on the lap of my good friend, the one and only, the amazing Sir 100 Mg Lamictal.  All is well, no fuck-ups, no regrets for the past four weeks [except, maybe, that they had to happen in the first place].  Just fine, thank you.

But it’s fascinating.  When I dip out of personality, when I move toward either extreme, I suddenly feel like I’m outside of myself, watching.  Pulling the strings, maybe.  There are subtitles and stage directions.

“Girl sits in class, overwhelmed by her frustration.  Moisture—not tears, but something else—rise to the corners of her eyes.  When the session is over, she stands and walks into the restroom.  She walks into a stall, sits down, tilts 45 degrees and sucks her thumb, head against the side of the stall.  She breathes.  She breathes.  She breathes.”

“Girl laughs laughs laughs so loudly, people turn.  In a hushed voice, she talks shit about the people sitting in the room with her.  The corner of her mouth turns up, smirks.  Not the usual one, her normal smile.  Her eyes tilt down.  This smile and these eyes—fuck, she looks wicked.  Fuck, she feels wicked.  Someone should watch out.”

She should watch out.

I could continue on for days, you know—I could go on and on, give case after case.  I could tell you about watching myself spike alcohol into my blood, about tequila shots and trying not to drive willfully into trees.  I could tell you about watching myself lie awake at night or about the long and wandering thoughts, the deep dangerous ones that would flash across my mind.  I could tell you all these things, and so many more.

But it’s all prologue, or prelude, or whatever, to the best result of my self-awareness, what finally occurred to me:

I was at the grocery store, buying our weekly supplies.  Here, the bag boys always offer to take out your cart, and then ask if you’re sure if you decline.  I thought about it, and wondered if they are just always spoiling to go outside, if they want to escape their inside duties for a moment.  So, one night, I asked the bag boy as he was pushing my cart.  “Policy,” he said, “we have to ask a second time.  We have to ask if you’re sure.”  So, the next time I was in, I declined once.  And when asked a second time, I declined again, smiling.  I was in on the secret.

And it occurred to me: when you are manic, the universe is whispering to you.  When you are manic, you are always in on the joke.

You just never realize that the joke is on you.

It starts on a Saturday morning.  I slump out of bed and remember that I forgot to take my pills the night before.  So, I shake one Lamictal into my hand, and open the package that holds my birth control pills.  The last one I had taken was Wednesday.  Thursday and Friday are still there.  I stand still.  Completely still.

What was I doing Thursday, I think quickly?  What was I doing, what was I doing?  Then I remember: Joey got dizzy at work.  Joey hadn’t been eating because he was sick.  Joey hit a car on his way home.  I put him to bed and went out to get him Ensure, Mucinex and a milkshake.  Ate dinner in bed with him and fell asleep—intending to get up later.  But I never did.  And it never occurred to me that I hadn’t taken the pills.  Two nights gone, no pills.

***

You know, it wouldn’t be such a big deal if it wasn’t such a big deal.  So what?  Just take a pill.  It’ll be ok.

Except it’s not.  Except this drug, in particular, is carefully titrated.  Except it will take me four weeks to get back to my dose.  The first two weeks, I cut my pills into quarters, swallow ¼ of what I should be taking.  The next two weeks, I cut them into halves on a cutting board in the kitchen.  Swallow them there, exposed by the subtle blinking of the fluorescent lights.

***

It’s fine, I tell everyone.  I’m fine.  I’m fine.  I’m fine.  I repeat the words over and over again.  I’m fine.  My best friend, my psychiatrist, my mother.  I’m fine.

And I am, honestly.  That is the simple answer, the short answer, a true answer.

The longer answer is: I’m fine, and I’m working mighty fucking hard to be that way.

The challenges of my every-day life are magnified by the absence of my chemical crutch.  There are late-night papers to be written, for the first time since I was last crazy [and God, that doesn’t feel like a coincidence].  My car breaks down for what I declare is the last goddamn time.  Buying a new one takes time, and I sometimes feel trapped in my house.  I am flailing, sometimes, before wrapping myself up in a blanket or a book or a bath.  He doesn’t know it, but I am mentally flailing, until I turn on my left side and push myself back into him.  Wrap yourself here, I want to tell him, and it’ll stop.  Just trust me, I know it will.

But sometimes, the pleasures are magnified too.  I fall hard for a new friend, the rare girl in my life.  Sitting next to each other in the lab, we giggle in fits and talk shit in lowered, hushed voices.  When we aren’t together, we send text messages and our inside jokes accumulate like snow on something rolled down a hill.  Food is suddenly spicier, and my eyes water and my unmyelinated nerves scream and I choke down glasses of water and margarita until I have the slightest buzz.  Then saunter off, wobbly, smiling, laughing.  Sex is faster, and I ask for more dangerous things.  I am light-headed, or held down and fighting, falling halfway off the bed and upside-down.  I try to follow the lines of control—who is in power now?  Me?  Him?  Both or neither?  The answer is always best when it’s unclear.

***

This, of course, comes to the heart of the matter.  At times, when I am most vulnerable and open, when I talk about the past, I have to analyze what happened then.  What went wrong and how can I stop it?  Can I ever say with 100% certainty that it will never happen again?

In the midst of this aching vulnerability, I see the truth: that I could have stopped it.  That is, and will always be, my burden.  Bipolar disorder may have lowered my threshold, but I still crossed it.  There were a million outs, and I could have taken any one of them.  Sometimes, I did—ignored a phone call or pulled myself, turning, out of one of their grasps.  But not without turning back, tossing my head over my shoulder, smiling that old smile.  The memories are so seductive because they make me feel like I was good at something, once.  These days, sometimes, I feel like I can’t win.  But back then, dammit—I was good at something.  But I was very bad at maintaining control.

These days, I’m much better, but I still feel the tugging, the desire to spin out of my own control.  I’ve long theorized that these desires came from a lifetime that required control—oldest child, high school valedictorian, successful woman on the path to being something people dream about, something people would kill for.  My professional life, and everything it has taken to get this far, has required tremendous control.  I’m not surprised I want to lose that sense of power in other places.  I’m not surprised that I want to find myself swept away by whim, by emotion, by anything that I don’t choose.

So I am sitting, filled with want.  I want to kiss someone on the collarbone.  I want to reach out my pinky and wrap it around someone else’s.  I want to be able to pull someone’s hand and go somewhere dark.  At least, that’s what my wild mind tells me.

But I step back, smiling, and walk away.  No, I say.  What you want is to find yourself not knowing where you are.  You want 60 seconds of confusion, you want 15 seconds where you don’t know what is going to happen next.  You want the tiniest flicker that something unexpected will happen.

***

Which, unexpectedly, happens.  We’re sitting around, watching TV with friends.  One of them offers to roll me a pure tobacco cigarette.  I accept, with his promise that I don’t know what I’m in for.  That it will be incredible.

So, we share it back and forth, a simple kind of intimacy that I’ve come to appreciate and relish.  I pull the smoke down into my lungs—I am inexperienced, and bad at it.  I’ve smoked enough times to know what to do, but not nearly enough times to do it without choking or looking very unprofessional.  I feel nothing.

So, he passes it back to me, and says the rest is mine.  I draw in heavy, hold the smoke in my lungs until I’m coughing, suddenly nauseous and very dizzy, disoriented and confused.  I have no idea what will happen next, but I do know that I need to sit down.  Violently, my ass hits the edge of the porch, and I reel back.  The nausea subsides, but the dizziness, the haziness, the brilliant confusion lingers.  I pull Joey in behind me, and I fall backwards into him.  I fit perfectly there, and I remember that love is a choice, and that we have chosen each other—not just once, but many times.  The night is lovely, suddenly.  Everything that was wrong, everything that has happened drains away.  It will come back.  But for a few minutes, I’m out of control.  And I haven’t ruined anything.

I’m fine, I say to myself.  I’m fine.