The Tides Within

(Bipolar Disorder - in style of Warsan Shire)

Tell them about the day you swallowed the sun,
how it burned through your veins like liquid gold,
how sleep became a distant memory, a childhood friend
you outgrew. Tell them about the colors that don’t exist,
how you saw them anyway, painted them across the sky
with hands that couldn’t stop moving.

Your mother says, slow down child,
but how can you explain that slowness is death
when your mind is a rocket breaking atmosphere,
when your thoughts are shooting stars
leaving trails of fire across your neurons?

Then tell them about the crash,
how darkness comes not like night
but like an avalanche, burying you
in your own bones. How your bed
becomes an ocean floor, and you,
a shipwreck no one is looking for.

Depression is a language your body learned
before your mouth could speak,
mania is the tongue you swallowed
to keep from screaming your brilliance
to an underwhelmed world.

Remember the time you spent your rent money
on three hundred origami cranes
because you were certain they would come alive
and carry your sadness away?
Remember how beautiful that belief felt?
Remember how the landlord didn’t care?

You are the granddaughter of the moon,
they say, and maybe this explains
the way you wax and wane,
the way you pull at other people’s oceans.
Your lover left because she couldn’t understand
how someone could be two different people.
You wanted to tell her that you are not two
but many, a universe of selves
expanding and contracting
like a cosmic breath.

In your up days, you write love poems
to strangers on the subway,
give away your grandmother’s rings,
believe you can taste colors.
In your down days, you forget
how to spell your own name,
how to make your lungs remember
their single task.

But here is something they don’t tell you
about bipolar disorder:
sometimes, in between the tides,
there are moments of perfect stillness,
when you are neither moon nor sun
but simply human,
and these moments taste like mercy.