I know sometimes
It’s still hard to let me see you
In all your cracked perfection,
But please know:
Whether it’s the days you burn
more brilliant than the sun
Or the nights you collapse into
my lap
Your body broken into a thousand
questions,
You are the most beautiful thing
I’ve ever seen.
I will love you when you are a
still day.
I will love you when you are a
hurricane.
- Clementine von Radics
This was all I wanted to hear,
what I longed to hear. To be loved despite becoming a hurricane force
destroying everything in my path. I had become ugly and frightening and I saw
that all etched on his face. Horrifying and volatile, he’d seen something in me
usually reserved only for the darkest depths of my own buried mind. He couldn’t
love me anymore. To him my illness became me and I could not be extracted from
the dark, thick, tar like mess of mania that had smothered me. The lightness
and clean love we had known was in the past now, what was left were fragments
of a relationship that had been balancing precariously on the edge of sanity. I
had fallen, and he didn’t want to follow. I cannot blame him for this, but it
hurt to have my safety net wrenched from under me. He was there but not present.
There were no gifts, no flowers, no magazines, no letters – no condolence. He
was afraid of this nonsensical being I had become. And what was worse, it was
him that I’d run to.
He heard the strangest things
fall from my lips, they hung in the air between us, little clouds of poison
polluting the normality we’d known. It would never be the same after this, I’d
disturbed him. My peculiar utterances shook rid the logical, sweet girl he’d
known and I became a kind of mystery you don’t want to unravel. There was a
Jekyll and Hyde monstrous moment, and the revelation that there was another
version of my being that was unassembled and dishevelled shook us both.
However, I knew myself, what I truly believed and why I behaved the way I did.
Although the actions I displayed seemed erratic and chaotic, to me they strung
together like little mismatched remnants haphazardly forming some kind of
togetherness. They were an integral part of my being. He didn’t know this, and
I couldn’t explain it to him. There is only one love I deigned to disclose the
inner workings of my distorted head to, and she smiled and nodded kindly as I
unfolded these wistful and grave ideas and laid them at her feet. I didn’t have
that affinity with him. I’d lost him. We didn’t speak about what had occurred,
and the silence engulfed us. I told him I felt lonely once and he asked, why,
was I not with my mother? As if the simplicity of being alongside someone so
familiar could cure the ache of losing my mind. No, I was not with her. I felt lonely
because I was alone.
