What Even Is Harmony

The bed would normally pitch and roll beneath me, springs at different levels, squealing. Its padding was worn or maybe it was made, since new, as always thin and shoddy: merely a shadow to lay upon, or at least it was that night. Typically I could bring myself to find an inevitable tiredness, as I would patiently wait it out. Time would mass to lower me to a still, settled peace. Late as it was already, thirty minutes, an hour at rest had had no effect. I tried to remember how I would, how I should, droop, bodily, to the drag of sleep. Instead I was sharp, my thoughts were, but there was no thread of consciousness running through my mind, so to say they were thoughts was wrong. They weren’t anything: it was an acuity I felt. A honed precision trained on the absence of rest, arresting the part of me typically blunt, the part of me that should be hollowed out and filled with the allure of semi-dreaming, mindless in its wandering. My awareness gazed with the nothing of darkness. If I wanted I could tear through the dark empty vacuum of wakefulness with my teeth. I wanted to run. I didn’t move.

I didn’t want to turn. I didn’t want to lose the only hope I had of sleep. Changing myself around would wake me even though I couldn’t imagine myself still, settled, easing rather than the pointed rod, hard and steeled to those moments filled with readiness for the nothing I couldn’t picture as coming. There was nothing pressing me. Equally there was nothing holding me.

I turned over, mattress and sheets sparse and lacking the depth I found close to slumber. Lacking my cushioning as I unwillingly refused the prospect of dreams. I lifted my arm outside the duvet. The hope was to find a new comfort. The release of a limb from the press of my bed clothes that were oppressive and funereal, to a live body, rather than a night’s easy swaddling.

I turned again, placing my released arm behind my head, hand beneath my ear. I tried to clear my mind from the worry of awareness. I stood in front of a door, in an apartment block. I knocked on the door and saw the light take on the thickness of blood. I turned from that apartment to another. I stood square in front of the second door as the first opened. I walked down the corridor away from the people calling to me. I was mad. Mad, mad, mad, mad. It was madness what I’d done. I sat outside a café. I called them cunts. Fucking cunts. Boyfriends were cunts. Exes were cunts. They schemed to tease me into baring myself. I bared my words at them. The harsh yellow sun, glowing, fiery, screamed at me screaming at them. Cunts. Fucking cunts! I was mad. Mad, mad, mad.

I turned again in the bed. It was all who I was. I was mad, then I no longer was, that was my only excuse. I wasn’t in control. The people who stared at me I’d never see again. The city was vast. If they did see me they wouldn’t remember. I remembered. I forced my head deeper into the pillow. I was mad. Mad, mad, mad.1

I was too warm. It wasn’t a cool night but neither was it a hot night. I began to sweat, or at least heat to the point where dampness in pyjamas was soon to come. Loose flannel fabric clinging within every turn, corner and folding of my body. I breathed in through my nose. I recalled how I used to breathe. How each breath would steady me as I recovered during those days at the hospital. A collection of the self and a forcing away of worries. I was mad.

I rolled onto my belly. I lifted my torso to rearrange ribcage, my lowered arm, my top digging into me. I felt the swell of my breath swamp the pillow I stuffed my face into. I rolled onto my back, kicked my leg free, let the air swim against my skin.

The pinpricks of who I had been, how I had been, pierced my eyes. I closed them.2 I didn’t know if my eyes were open before and washed by the warm street-lighting passing by the edges of my curtains or if they were shut, bathed in the swell of my own mind slowly boiling. Now chilling. Both at once. All mad. Mad, mad, mad.

I couldn’t.

I opened my eyes. I struck my still covered leg out from the covers and twisted both feet onto the floor. I could be mad again, but not that night. I had to escape that night. I had to escape the prospect of recounting all my insanity-adventures when I couldn’t give into sleep. I stood, walked to my desk and switched on my lamp. I hoped the small light would seethe against my eyes, salted, and make me aware that although too awake for sleep I was too sleepy for wakefulness. The light didn’t singe my eyes. They weren’t wide but neither were they struck by the glare of mid-night urgent purpose. I was primed for a day in the middle of a city shut down.3 I turned on my laptop.

I went to the kitchen, illuminated via street-light rolling through the skylight. I had no intent of disturbing the slow orange peace. The stillness that showed in the room waited for me to cut a meaningful swathe through it, sending invisible waves in a wake that would wash on no-one but me. I went to the counter, reached up to the shelf and took down a cup. I put three spoons of instant coffee in the mug. I hesitated before I checked the level of water in the kettle. Coffee would be acceptance. An admission that I was, for the first time in months, prepared to drive myself through the lonely isolation of night.4 I laughed. I was isolated all the time but mostly contented with myself among the signs of activity during daylight. The gentle passing of cars on the street. The people I imagined looking at me, seeing through me, into me. Judging me. The people I assured myself had no concern for me.

During the day there was the openness of the city, the suburbs, the countryside where I could travel to anywhere I wanted but sitting lazily on a bench on the street, or walking towards some close-by sought purpose, I knew I wouldn’t move towards the greater possibilities all around me. I wouldn’t find any grandeur available to me. During the day I was stuck by my surrounds. Life secured me smaller into myself, even when I pushed my boundaries beyond myself to the me larger than I was, tied down by the steady daylight of meaning. I could find purpose during the day, even if it was just sitting letting purpose escape me, not seeking it. Night time was all mine.5 I flicked the switch on the kettle.

I took a sip of the coffee, thankful I had plenty of milk left in the fridge and sat before my laptop. I danced my fingers, tapping keys with no intent to press on them. A haphazard beat rattled out against the keyboard. I was awake, in the night. I had coffee, in the night. I was finding the night with nothing coming for me and nowhere to bring myself. Rattling out a disordered alphabet with my fingertips I was ready for the ocean I was to dive under: the small hours of everything and everyone asleep I was to explore.

I entered my password. The blue light of my desktop background was familiar but I couldn’t remember the last time I just sat and watched an empty screen. I looked over the icons for chatrooms I hadn’t returned to since I was in the hospital. Some dedicated to computers, some dedicated to hobbies I’d thought on for a few weeks; dressmaking, video games, local politics, crocheting, literature, one dedicated to smoking. None of the people I chatted with knew of my madness, at least not my recent episode. None knew I had been taken away from them by a rife paranoia telling me they were active in conspiracies against me. That the video games men were in control of my internet connection, cutting it when I pushed too close to a realisation they were teaming against me. That the local politics forums tried to keep the small, mad women away from any stakes in change by monitoring her words for inconsistencies in her wider world. Searching for the evidence of hypocrisy in the differences she asked to change and so stop any challenge to their easy, social-circle positions.

I didn’t return to those chat rooms because returning to them in the midst of night-time wakefulness with nothing to ground me would have me confront my delusions without the clarity of daylight to escape with.

I opened up the website for the gardening course. I looked through the outline of fees and loaded up a spreadsheet for my calculations.

I looked at the small empty cells in the blank document and knew there wouldn’t be many numerals to fill them with. A column for income would barely be necessary, a single weekly payment being my all. I entered the figure anyway. I looked at my worth, then decided not to take from it. I would let it sit.

I opened up my music folder, picked out the most soothingly innovative, raucously telling, now tired but resolute and familiar 70s album I could find. The truth of my finances could wait, should wait, yet still I looked at the figure I had to live by in small 12 point Liberation Sans.

That was who I was. Those few small figures.6 I couldn’t earn more than what it said. Not without destroying myself. I couldn’t make myself into something more. The way a bigger, better, brighter future was held before everyone was the shadow cast over me. I couldn’t warm in its light. I couldn’t bring myself close to it, only finding bitter cruel mentalities in its frozen shade. To freeze beneath it would be one thing. To be turned to a cinder in its fierce glare another. I wanted to walk up to it but I knew I shouldn’t, couldn’t approach it. I knew not to try, experience spoke against trying.7

I opened up Windows Notepad. The most basic of programs for ideas. I thought of the source and totality of my value. I typed in the figure again. I didn’t want to write the words, two hundred, just over two hundred, I couldn’t want to give them their English form, but I wanted them to be in a raw document designed for language.

Money wasn’t a language I was versed in. I couldn’t spend my thoughts or words in a restaurant, telling the waiter I was deserving of a smoked salmon and spinach pasta, with a delicate red wine or full white wine and the prospect of a second glass. The next glass the wine I hadn’t already ordered, the one I really wanted having consumed and passed over what I already had. Words were something I could afford, but I had no way to spend them. Thoughts were something I had an abundance of.

I stared at my weekly payment I had given into writing, my entire savings, gone again by the next week just in time for the next allowance.

I turned in my chair as the lyrics in the music filled me. I sang along to Patti Smith.

I danced in my chair. I was held to nothing in that moment. I didn’t need pasta, I couldn’t spend anything, I wanted wine. The song I sang to was all I had with me and I took the grace in that. I slowed as the music faded, before the next started up.

I looked back at my screen, suitably amused by a few moments of release. Of accepting I needed a release. I wrote the word “fucker” next to my weekly Disability Allowance figure. You’re a fucker I said to myself. You’re a fucker I said to my paycheque—I laughed disdainfully as I thought it–a vagary on its true meaning.8 You’re a fucker and all I will ever have.

I googled schizophrenia, wanting to blame it, and knowing it’d take me to the wikipedia page that wouldn’t have changed much since I last looked. There would be nothing to blame. The page loaded. I looked. It hadn’t changed. I didn’t read it. Not again.9

I opened back up the spreadsheet with my one entry on it and tried to imagine what I could spend the money I didn’t have on. I sat and thought. I imagined lottery winnings then restrained my desire. I wrote ‘Gardening’ then highlighted it in red. I wrote ‘A Garden’ and highlighted it in green. I wrote €300,000 in the cell next to Garden and inserted a new column to write ‘A House’ in. I could buy a house, near the city, for €300,000, with a garden. I wrote the thirty-something Euro figure I paid for social-welfare assisted rent beneath my weekly income. I calculated how long it would take me, saving that much, to be able to afford my house without risk of a landlord upsetting everything I held so tenuously.

I stood, moved to the bed and sat on the edge of it. I stared at the screen and could just about make out the black writing beneath the blocks of highlighting colour. I lifted myself up a little, then let myself back down into the sink of the mattress. I appreciated the precarity of my seat. I appreciated the surety I knew was my body. A body abused by illness but still young and not yet showing the signs of the worst of my mind.

The previous time I’d had an episode, seven years ago, during college, during my recovery, I’d wanted homelessness. It would have been an escape. I didn’t want it to be a childish decision to run away from everything, knowing I had a home, somewhere, a bed within that home, a fridge I could fruitfully stock, and a kettle with which to make coffee. I wanted choice to be removed from me. I wanted to be forced into having nothing and finding the freedom in that to simply give in.

It was the only time I’d felt the pull of cutting myself. The full intensity of a feeling so whole I didn’t know if I would ever identify a point of real meaning within it. I had thought of the razors in my bathroom. Taking a blade from one and pulling it across my thigh, only a small incision. Neat and delicate. It wouldn’t have been pain. Seeing my skin separate wouldn’t have been a desecration of the self, or a scar on the mind’s health as much as the body, rather it would be a confirmation in release.

I didn’t do it. Instead I stood in the student apartment I had at the time and stared out the window. There was a bike shed at the opposite side of the courtyard. It was turned in its placement, against the prevailing winds, so I couldn’t see into it but I knew most of the students kept their bikes in their apartments. I wouldn’t sleep in that particular shelter. I would find another like it, knowing such designs were out there. Homeless, I would have been free of all material concerns. My desire’s force was in pulling me further into my own inescapable circumstance of tidal emotion, depressing waves drowning me already deep below the crisp clear air. In that moment the rush of homelessness, the longing for a lack of all reason was the frothing surface of the ocean I gasped in breaths of. I couldn’t swim anywhere. I couldn’t bring myself to new ground. I languished in the swell. I didn’t cut myself. I had no release. I persevered. Eventually I rose above it, for a time.

Sitting on the bed I felt the full awesomeness of that remembered bodily feeling, recalled to be aware of it, combined with a mind given into it, taking hold of it, knowing it in its full glory with it now in the memory of a distant considered past. I felt the flood of madness retreating as the bed edged beneath me and I allowed myself to know the totality of the push and pull of what that madness had done. The richness of completely knowing feeling. Knowing inescapable feeling as its full truth and meaning.

I felt like the computer was drawing me back to basic living. To load up another album; the one I was listening to coming onto repeat. To return to mediocre concerns of occupation with websites and pinterest and games. Instead I arched backwards. I ran through the high points of recollection. I lathered myself in the soft cloth of dreamy light I was resting in, fully awake and aware of the keystone of my history. I bathed in the quiet isolation I had found myself floating through. I had nothing to do, nowhere to be. I was by myself and it didn’t bother me, or at least I told myself that.

When I first saw the doctors with my latest episode they prescribed new medication, seeing as I had taken myself off my old drugs. That night, minutes, half an hour, an hour after swallowing that one small pill I lay in my bed, mind agitated and twitching, a noise of thoughts roaring within me when suddenly all was quelled. I hadn’t realised how swollen my perception was; inflamed with an even, encompassing roar until I could see the quietness settle around me. My vision didn’t change, my hearing didn’t change, instead there was space between me and the world that had previously been filled by the static of signals I couldn’t receive.

The world no-longer was something to decode, it simply was, existing beyond me and me entirely separate to it. Me a part of it fully entitled to my own simple life trawling my being through the depths of being, both mine and the world’, the heights of my sky, the easily pushed aside obstacles I could choose to negotiate with a sure, secure step. I was purposeful then: medication granted me peace. I had spent a lifetime unconsciously seeking reason in everything and in that instant I had my reason. My existence was silence, waiting to speak, knowing there was no need to.

I didn’t need to decode the world prior to that, it simply held meaning. I was always aware to potential. I was in a constant conversation with what I have to presume was myself, but I saw aspects of myself all around me in the furore of living. I saw aspects of who I should be in the settings I found myself in but more often I saw disfigured images of who I was, how I betrayed the world, and how that was wrong. I saw a steady edifice being constructed only for me to upset the work on the star-seeking marvel with my mere presence, heavens forbid I speak in that moment. I knew, from all the worst parts of me brought to bear on the goodness naturally without me, that my instilling myself in the world’s shape was a blot on beauty, or at least natural order, natural coexistence. When I lost the necessity of finding meaning around me, that night with my brand new drugs, when all the sounds I heard were silenced I knew meaning was entirely my own. I needn’t create meaning. I knew I could simply be within a greater lack of being. The world had no secret knowledge. I hadn’t known I was searching for it but with the one small tablet I could stop trying to find what didn’t exist. If there was a reason to that silence then it was that I could fill it, if I chose to.

I tried to think on whether I had the same silence in the night around me, months past my first taking of my new anti-psychotic. The hum I found was low, but there was a familiar hiss to my surrounds and I could just about make out something leaking. Whether that gentle slipping was from me outwards, the vastness beyond my home silently enveloping to take me, or the world spinning without me as some un-asking spirituality I didn’t know. All I did know was that what had once been uncompromisingly still, a mirror reflecting only itself, was now reflecting more, it was taking a portion out of me from all I could discern.

I sat back against the wall hoping to will the silence into being again. There were no raindrops falling against my window, no wind blowing through the roof. There were no cars on the road outside and no sound of revellers in a drunken haze sloppily making their way home.

I looked at the clock on the computer. It was almost 5am.

I remembered earlier nights and saw images of me fussing with keys in the lock. I recalled slow walks along the river. I decided I would go on another walk when the dawn came, but for that still night I could lie back, hearing the music repeat for a third time, and take from the security of unthreatening memories. I pulled the duvet around me and allowed myself the soothing comfort of orderly recollection that didn’t, couldn’t harass me.

I couldn’t find any memories, instead I found the idea of memories. I found the idea of pasts prompting me towards a future. In the midst of psychosis I was reactionary. Every perception was handled at a level, so high and so fast, I could barely comprehend. Meaning was a channel through me, flowing, bursting, carrying me forward. I realised, during my most symbolic actions, at least as I saw them at the time, I had no understanding of history. No perspective of a future beyond mad cause and effect. Experience wasn’t brought to bear except in the maelstrom churning within me, pushing me to continue as though pause was a danger that would suck me under the wired wild words in my mind. For all I had been through, in the past, in my thoughts, I couldn’t understand it during my episode. I didn’t know if I could fully understand it in that moment. I didn’t need to.

Stretching my neck back, as though I was ready to be intubated and sedated on a surgeon’s table, I knew how lost I had been, unable to contemplate anything beyond the immediate. I tried to imagine a singular existence, constantly turning towards new light, and it was within my reach but standing nearby was mediated knowledge, passed through the lens of memory, or seen in comparison to a future, all prospects.

I found myself among the grist of time, folding back on itself, opening up to something new and old. I found myself in the simple peace of controlled exploration.

I fell asleep that night combining comfortable memories, hopeful ambitions and the immediate touch of the present. Before I drifted off all had coalesced into one element, fully known, but not a singular insanity, just the dream of what was to be. Of the peace I could find.

Index - Part 2 Chapter 4