Hell

Last night while sitting in my regular AA meeting, I was struck by the memory of being in jail the last time. I recall lying on the bed, on the top bunk, looking back on my life through the lens of mania--when a million different events and details seem woven together in a tapestry of connection and meaning, fate and design. I remember being a little boy at the mercy of his anger and those adults charged with his care and protection--protection from himself and others, and the protection of others from him. I saw a cycle of uncontrolled action and loss of freedom. It seemed like an inevitable circle that would play out for the rest of my life, in the way the thought of a maniac can have certainty and reality, no matter how detached from reality it actually may be. For someone in acute mania thought can become fact and fact can be altered by though. The mind of the maniac is self-absorbed and self-centered to an extreme; it believes in its own veracity and is bound at the same time to its own delusion.

In that moment, feeling the certainty that this broken record of my life would forever spin and skip, I couldn't bear the possibility, the inevitability, of the continued cycle f loss of self-control and loss of freedom. I truly wanted it to end. I said to my god, my creator, "If this is my fate, please take me now. If I must keep living out this nightmare, I don't want to live." It was the first time since I was 15 that I would have death than life. My creator didn't take me; I was left on that bunk, and somehow the moment passed. I took it as an answer. Whether or not it was didn't matter--I took it as one. It was in that bed that I sank to a hell in my own mind, and something brought me back out.

It was also in that bed that I began to let go of J. Something in me shifted. I remember watching the snow fall on that March day and thinking of something I had written or said about J. I said that I would wait for her until hell froze over. Well I was in hell and it had frozen enough to snow, so I had waited long enough. I didn't completely let go of her at that time, but I began to. When I got home after being released, I had a phone message from B. In that moment I was able to take hold of my lingering love for her and finally put down my manic obsession with J.

My mind doesn't often go back to that hellish place, lying on a mattress in a jail cell on the special floor reserved for special people like me, but I need to keep that memory alive somewhere inside me where I can pick it up every now and then, dust it off, and remember where I never want to go again.