Governmentality Meets Bipolar

I love the autumn and I especially love my walk to school every morning. It’s my time for myself. Its that time of day where I feel that everything I see was given to me. The leaves change their colors just for me, just so I can see them and enjoy them. The light trickling through the branches is mine, the shadows flitting across the floor, yes, that is also for me. The grey rocks arranged along the path were just what I needed. I and nothing else exists, I barely notice the joggers with the black LCD screens strapped to their arms, measuring their heart rates, or the teenagers with their acne cutting school and making out. It’s a good time for me to connect with how I feel and what I want to get away from. It’s a time where I know I can get away from everything and yet that I cannot get away from myself and I am forced to look at this disobedient defiant self, who refuses to be regulated, who refuses to be governed.

I’ve come to know that if I want to keep people around me, if I want to be respected and if I want one less reason to feel self loathing, one less reason to give other people the right to make choices for me, to tell me what can and cannot go into my body, to become medically regulated, to become socially regulated, then I need regulate myself and my bipolar. It must not be displayed, I walk around imploding, and I feel rage of unknown origins. I draw it in, tightly sealing and containing it, it simmers as I conduct its conduct and it conducts mine.

Restitution

It’s the fourth night that I haven’t been able to sleep. I lie in bed and I try to be aroused. I try and feel something, something to remind me of a connection we had. I stay up to masturbate so it helps me sleep, but then it just keeps me awake. It takes so long to be aroused, different memories, from long ago. Memories of a time when it was passionate when I would just look at you and my vagina would clench, arousal that was painful, that consumed me. Just standing next to you close enough I could smell you, your smell would make me dizzy, it would be difficult to breathe. I would hold my breath just to keep your smell inside of me. Just as I grasp a memory and just as I start to feel aroused, a memory of you digging your nails into my back as you orgasm and it makes me orgasm, reality is quick to snatch it from me, with images of the repetitiveness of sex that I would rather be flossing or clipping my toe nails than having. I lose the memory and I lose the arousal. Minutes tick away and I can’t fall asleep because I need to masturbate to fall asleep, which means I need to be aroused to masturbate. I try quickly to conjure another memory of a time where I enjoyed it with you. Do I really have to think this hard and think this far back? Maybe this was the inevitable that such a powerful passion would burn itself out, maybe I didn’t try hard enough to keep it going or maybe I tried too hard? My thoughts keep me awake, and I try again to find restitution. I hear your voice in my head telling me, “Everything is fine, you just like having drama, because you’re pmsing”. Another memory, another moment lost to a past that’s irretrievable. I remember my hands used to tremble before I would touch you, and when my fingers would find your skin they would burn and that burning would consume me. It’s so far away, so long ago that it feels like it was someone else. A someone that is not this cold clammy body that I find myself touching and not feeling anything. I forget about you, which isn’t hard since you are sleeping in the guest bedroom. Tonight is because I said I needed the bed to spread out in, but really it was because I wanted to masturbate, other nights were because I snored, because I moved, or because the cats were making too much noise. I wanted to masturbate and I wanted to be aroused and the only thing that arouses me is our past. Its hard remembering a past when the present is right there next to me reminding how far away I’ve gotten from this past. I finally find a memory that I can hold onto, I deny the present and detach myself from it completely, and I can finally orgasm. Before my orgasm is over waves of sadness run through me. I find myself crying quietly, my chest painfully tight. I’ve disconnected myself from the present and put myself in a past that doesn’t exist anymore, and when it starts to fade away, I do not know where I am.

You Take My Breath Away

You take my breath away. I say this and I sigh. I say this and I fill my lungs with air. I exhale loudly. Freely. I feel my chest expand, my spine curve, my diaphragm reach its utmost extent and quiver, tremble, almost a yawn, almost a sigh and almost an orgasm. I exhale loudly as loudly, as I need to. As loudly I can now that you are watching me. I left the room to breathe freely. I left the room to explore my breath and how I have been holding it. I left the room to try and understand what it means to say you take my breath away. You are here now. I’m not sure why. You are not the faceless, nameless intangible protagonist, subject, object that I hide in my words, you are real and you are in my life. You are ***. I have named you. Now you’ve came out of the room to sit with me and I cannot breathe as loudly as I want or as freely as I want. I censor, I censor my breath and I’ve censored my words. I censor my words and I breathe at about 10% of my previous capacity. My diaphragm does not expand to its utmost extent. I breathe silently. You’ve taken my breath away.
I will not end this piece of writing here, hide the ugliness of myself, or hide the ugliness of you through literary dramatization and mystification. I will say this. You take my breath away. I hold it. I regulate it and I make it as quite and subtle as I can. I flare my nostrils, pull back my soft palate and slow it down. It’s my trade-off, so I can be near you. To breathe freely and fully means that you will be irritated, to curl up to you and let my breath come as it wants to, as loudly as erratically as it needs to, means that you will not want to be curled up next to me. That is the trade-off. We all come with our baggage and mine is that my desire to be near you takes precedence over my breath. In that way, you take my breath away.

Writing Block

It’s been so long since I wrote. I write and it’s clunky. I write and it’s contrived, its forced. I try to let the words flow; I’m scared that they are pretentious. How did I string the words together before into sentences that were not derivatives, plagiarisms of someone else’s expression?
I look back and think it must have been someone else’s writing. I read things I wrote and I’m so impressed, maybe I am stupid to be impressed, maybe they are just as bad as this clunky clumsiness, but they freed me and this doesn’t.
The words flowed. It was always about flowing, flowing not like water, but like air, flowing effortless frictionless.
I write and reread and its clunky, clumsy, word after word. Hesitant.
Pause, is this pretentious? Or is this lame? Is this pretentious so it’s lame? Or is it lame that it becomes pretentious. I have to laugh at myself because once I’ve asked that question in that way in this prose then that it was it has become, pretentiously lame and worst of all uninspired.
There is no rhythm for my words to dance to. I would have liked to use reverberate because that is the word that sounds right, not dance, but reverberate does not have the right meaning.
How many times have my words, my heart, my chest “danced” how many times have situations, thoughts, desires “sung”?
A few words strung here and there used, reused till they have lost all rhythm, all element of surprise and inspiration. Uninspired. The same worn pack of cards, you know what’s coming next, you know every bend and fold and which card it corresponds to, there is no more game to play, it is predictable, the excitement contrived, the excitement forced. My words are words, my emotions are not expressed in words, and they become contrived by my words. Clunky, silent and clumsy, awkward post-modern and pretentious. My expression not just my words are predictable. If I say it’s contrived, I know it will be followed by me saying, thinking or writing forced. I try to edit myself, to sound a bit more original to myself, but then it feels contrived, it feels forced.
I talk about you, again and again, always you, you the faceless, the nameless, the abstract, the hidden masked love. You change outside my words, but in my words you remain as you, eternally, unchanging, you. You were the transient, the fleeting. Once again predictable words strung together. If I say transient, then it will be followed by fleeting. You were the transient, the ethereal, the fleeting, but today you become the stagnant and the stagnation. You remain hidden in my words, but if I must write then you must become something other than you. Something unhidden and unmasked. You must become un-air-brushed, your ugliness exposed, your abstractness denied. You will be made tangible. My heart must not “sing” or “dance” or “quiver” with its love for you, but rebel, scream and free itself with its hatred towards you. My words must expose your ugliness not just mine.