The Things I Carry

 Sometimes, I imagine myself as a pendulum, strung from the intestines of some antique grandfather clock by the chords of my hair.  I know that I am composed of the polarities of Heaven and Hell and that Purgatory is a place I can’t hang onto for long.  (This image has been recycled in films since the beginning of time: Limbo is the edge of some canyon and my hands are neither calloused nor sinewy enough to perpetually grip onto the lip of the withered earth.)  

            This is the only way I know how to talk about my hypomania.  I am capable of making sense of some rudimentary physics concepts because they are inherent to my very being: oscillations, for me, can occur within the same day, within the span of a few hours, within one week, within each individual month that ultimately accumulates into many months, which will eventually form an entire year. I seesaw between moods, so that every emotion is like a different vacation spot, and I have the time to expend making day trips to each one.   I have toured the kind of loneliness where each heartbeat is a new harrowing surprise, and have made excursions towards undeniable elation, (when it’s as though every interaction with the world is a new drop of water helping to make the cup of the self brim with liquid.)

            And here’s the thing: hypomania is in part what has helped to fertilize the ovum of my creativity.  My respective elevation and deflation gives birth to zygotes: ideas seeded in the confines of my brain, curling their roots around my nervous tissues, fighting to sprout their little heads.  These plants push through the soil of my consciousness until I agree to sit down and nurture them, write about them so that they may fully germinate.  This, too, is where my insomnia stems from: I am so incessantly inundated with my own thoughts that I can’t sleep.  Sometimes, I am enamored with it, and I become overblown with pride for being able to operate without the kindling of dreams.  Other times, I am a fed-up lover, and fantasize about training myself to be one of the Buddhist monks who can exist in meditation and hear a gunshot without reaction: external noise is as “neutral as a bird crossing the sky” for these renunciants. 

Either way, I am prone to grandiose notions, and here is the one that has become a sentient life form in my mind today.  I haven’t been able to bar myself from looking at photographs of women during WWII: civilians, Red Cross nurses, Rosie the Riveters, female soldiers.  If this were the 1940s like I’ve always wanted it to be, and I was on the Home Front while you were off waging wars, I’d wait around for you forever.  I’d write you love letters and send you symbolic tokens of my affection that could survive the mail, like Martha in The Things They Carried:

In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble. An ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky-white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-but-together quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together. He wondered how the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet. Martha was a poet, with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself. He loved her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea salts and moisture. His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.

            It would be enough for both of us, subsisting on longing and distance and words alone. But this isn’t the Second World War, nor is it Vietnam all over again, and you’re not countries away from me, and even if you were, I’m not sure you’d ever make it back to the States anyway. And so I have moved on, or am trying to in spite of all my original intentions of remaining an unsullied little girl in the midst of this continual bloodshed.