What Even Is Harmony

Getting out of the hospital was a layered event. You came out of the small rooms where you met the psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, around a corner laden with posters for the next step for the lost, then past the best of the patients’ art pinned to the wall. You walked past the receptionist who would chat, not to the patients, not to my kind, but to the workers; cleaners, administrators, facilitators. We were the clients; temporary; only passing through one way, hopefully on our way to the other.

Stepping out the front door brought you to a wheelchair accessible ramp, then onto a walkway between plain, cut grass that marked the next layer of existence; a steady escape through non-threatening land, inexpensive to maintain; a twilight zone where nothing and no-one found purpose. That walk brought you through a transitory state, taking you from a safe, clinical world to a world I sometimes thought threatening: a world I knew was mostly uncaring.

That next phase was the people’s world. Real people with real concerns who—if they watched from their houses—could guess at what malady was rattling around a mind needing care, leaving an out-patient psychiatric day centre.

Then you were gone. You came to a road leading to an empty society where work, shopping, chats over coffee and commuting were the routine of concerns. For me it was all normality on a summer morning’s avenue when I had spent two weeks attending that hospital for my latest episode.1

Walking those tree lined streets as I went away from the hospital, embedded as the trees were in little patches of mud in the concrete, I found myself an alien. I would like to say the world was alien, unfamiliar despite me walking that route every day for two weeks, really I was wrong.

The madness infesting me was as though I’d never seen the street before. That I’d never been that version of myself before. I tried to apply insight as the doctors suggested, even though, as insanity goes, just feeling at odds isn’t psychologically worrisome. Still, I remembered to examine my thoughts and examine what I was experiencing as grounded in reality or not. To question whether my fears were based in circumstance not panic or paranoia. I wondered if I was only noticing the small details I’d never paid attention to.2 There was the ‘For Sale’ sign that hung from a red-bricked, low-roofed house and the cat that lay in one of the patches of sun wrestling its way through the leaves. The appearance of the street was the same as ever but the feel of it was different. At least how I perceived my feeling within it. I walked over the broken red paving stones, between the always present salted, diarrhoeic dog shit roasting in the sun, and around litter aged and secured by a summer with no rain to wash it down drains. It was all familiar but not mine: not my recalled truth. It was as though I was a new person empty of prior intent on this other-worldly yet familiar byway. I was new and ready to be filled with brightness and the river’s breeze, along with the living city twists on everyday beauty. I smelt the dryness of the dust, and pollen, and the close heat of car exhausts, offensive to my senses but with the compromise of me, anew, and basking in the high sun of freedom. My day was my own and I had to conquer whatever it was that worried me. Simply put I was vulnerable. I was taking in my surrounds as a newborn, preconscious thought awakening to the sights, sounds and feels of new experience.3 I didn’t want to be a new person. I didn’t want to be filled with whatever I happened upon on a seeming first walk as my first living as someone half-not again.4 I’d walked this route for two weeks. I was always this me, or at least getting-there.

I tried to recall exactly who I was. What health in my mind could and should be. I came to this part of the city as a schoolchild when teachers shooed a line of hand-holding nine-year-olds to an exhibition. It featured young artists none of us were accomplished enough to be featured in. I came later to this part of the city as a teenager with flagons of cider, naggins of vodka, and a deep longing for a quick shift with the guy, Mark, who didn’t pay me the attention I scaredly sought. This was a familiar street, and it was a familiar memory of Mark but it was dangerous: remembering myself lying bare-legged on a borrowed leather jacket on the grass as it featured him, or more them. Them being the ones who watched me, bugged my apartment, wanted revenge, all from behind implacable cold stares.5 If I was to recover I’d have to be able to examine those thoughts but in that moment they were sharp edged.

I counted my inhale. Held it. Counted my exhale. Breathing centres you.

I’m not sure if it was my harried mind and my fleeing from thoughts that made me light-headed, or if it was the slow rhythm, my counted circular breath, that changed that moment for me. I needed to sit down. I needed to keep moving. I knew a junction just a little way ahead had a bench. I walked towards it, a decision instead of a flow, not that I changed direction or pace but that goal of sitting and acceding to rest had become my destination: my purpose.

There’s a familiarity lost to madness. Something conniving to unseat you. Beneath your day-to-day are memories, knowledge of what’s true and what’s common and madness takes these realities from you. Some would say it’s a gift but it’s a double edged axe. If you can wield this axe you’ll find insight to the foundational parts of your life. You’ll hack at a soaring great tree, your life in knowing, to get down to your roots. Of course you’ll have injured the body of the tree, cut off branches and limbs. Most likely you’ll be bloodied by the axe, the tree’s resistance.

It’s you destroying nature as much as you destroying yourself.6

The familiarity I was losing to madness was that of my place on the street. I was floating without the anchor of myself. I tried to grab onto the trees I had slain to keep me secured. The houses off to my side, on the edge of my vision, appeared and disappeared. They came into my periphery then suddenly vanished. Reality was changing around me but I told myself it was simply my awareness of perception. Knowing the bench was close by was a comfort but my care-exposed thoughts, much like myself, felt pallid, as though I moved through an endless, faded projection. The houses seemed a facade and I had to assure myself real life existed within them. The world existed separate to my worries.7

The branches above me were deathly still despite the breeze. I looked up, shielded my eyes, then looked down again assured by the leaves’ shallow rattle between me and the sun.

A couple walked opposite me. I tried to focus on the woman, on an already accepted understanding that the houses held life, and growth couldn’t defy nature but all I could find was a fear of the man that walked beside her.

I told myself he was dressed simply. He wore a nice shirt with a logo, and well cut jeans that came down to brown shoes more formal than I would have expected. I knew it was a fashion, an affectation. I knew all this and I knew in the heights of my mind it was a sense of respectability that put those shoes on him. It was order in a world without. It was impression passed onto another, passed onto the woman that casually walked with him. He was grounded on ambitions for himself, for her, for them. He was hiding something. He was making an appearance. I breathed deep again. He looked at me. Acknowledged me as a nothing. My breath caught in my throat.

I stopped to lean against the wall as they walked, him not looking but his stare remaining with me.

Taking off my shoe I wanted to appear as though emptying out a small stone. I didn’t want him to know that I was camouflaging myself. That I was blending into the wall, the backdrop of housing, the meandering city but mostly the appearance of an everyday encounter with another traveller through an early summer morning. It wasn’t early morning, though, it was mid-morning. It was early for me.8 I was energised and anxious. My day was well started but I felt the silk of it cut away from me, sheared in two: me the tearing of that moment.

My eyes glanced over the couple, again, then again. I placed my view behind them but following them. I looked away, again, hastily: needing to avoid them but needing to know them.

My eyes were drawn up, once more, to watch as they stepped neatly next to each other; a pillaging military of men marched on my mind; I had feared worse.

I saw him take her hand in his. She trusted him. I couldn’t offer help. She wouldn’t want my help but I was only worrying for her as I was for myself. What he meant. What he could do. Deep down what he wanted to do.

Panic and paranoia. I knew what it was but that made those thoughts all the more real. This was me. I knew it was illness. I knew it was a prolonged shaking of my hold on an unfalsifiable truth and an unpierceable lie. They were content with each other and I was safe on my own on this sunlit street, in an acceptable part of the old town. I am safe I whispered over my breath. You are safe I instructed to myself. You’re not her. You’re not with him. They’re not here. They’re gone. I cast them, or more him, from my worries.

They passed. I became aware of the world with me in it, or me loose among it: I refused the thought I was a beacon for those who would hunt me. I was exposed to nothing but myself.9 I walked on. Keep going I told myself. Keep going. I reached the bench. I sat down and gasped in the full air around me, roaring inwards a release of stopping, sitting, knowing I had made it so far. I made it. I was making it every moment I carried on.

The hospital was part of carrying on, moving onwards and towards, walking another part of it; simplicity in life as all I could manage. I would make it to my home, which wasn’t bugged. I would fill my day, see my friends, have my first drink since I left the bar insane, those few weeks ago. This was a rare fear. I was recovering. I would sit and rest.

I set my shoes aside and put my feet on the grass. I could tell, more an assumption, there were no hidden needles or broken shards of glass.10 There was no certainty to the assumption of a connectedness to the safe earth rather a faith I believed in as a second watching self offering solace. I had to believe. I believed I was OK. You’re OK, I told myself. You’ve made it this far.

My grip on the plank of wood I rested on was firm; solid; sure. My grip on the world increased with every moment I spent aware of my day. You’re aware I told myself. Even if you don’t believe it you’re aware.

Index - Moment 1