Carol, Mr Vincent Rhodes, my mother and my sister were the most important people in my life as a child.

Carol was my mother’s sister. She was the oldest. Mr Vincent Rhodes was an only child, Carol’s son. When you live with manic depression you live both a life and a half-life. On the one hand, you live with your stone voice just as well as you do with the mask of deceit and deception. You all are my greatest happiness. If my mother has never known that, then if she reads these words she will know that now. She is my wish fulfilment. Memory is touch and glory. Memory is a glass ceiling, rock, paper, and scissors. It is I who permits my mind to feel. Permits it to feel the tracks of sadness like rain. The heavens opening up to meet me. I’ve learned that you are never prepared for wisdom. To keep my senses alive I must watch you, dance within your blind reach mum. Your village ravishes me. You’re everywhere. Your summer mouth. My soul mourns in dreams. My soul speaks to me in fragments of silence. I cannot change what I am. It is only at the end of the world when we realise what the meaning of betrayal is, decay, death, and solitude. It dies with us the same way our instinct does. My mother plays the piano in the morning. I can see where all her focus is streamlined to the page in front of her. Once I could decipher those notes but that is when I was a child. Our love is intense. Does she know that I would die for her? That I, I would die a succession of deaths for her. You’re emptiness and instant. To me my mother is spontaneity. Gossip never scratched the surface of ears, lips, teeth in our house.

Here I am now. My arms (healing rain) believing that I can live forever. The moon is everything. Carol taught me how to love. How to see beauty in things around me. She taught me how to write hate poetry, to hurt with feeling, to wound, to forgive. To be vicious. To remain unloved for the longest while possible. In the end after childhood my sister became my mother. Beautiful. Elegant. Sophisticated. I loved her, needed, wanted, and desired her in a powerful way. In the same way I did my mother. I stutter, I hate and in this way I have built up my resolve against the world. Against anything pretty, likeable, lovely that I might break. My mother and my sister left me behind. I couldn’t catch up to them. They took turns. I write to write (as I am doing now). Words leave the pen. I don’t know where they came from. Half the time it felt as if they didn’t come from me. Vincent taught me how to hate myself. Soak up insults. Put them away in the depths of pockets. Lose them like car keys. To find something different in myself. Something particular significant or specific. It was my mother who taught me how to nurture. Shake with the mere ordinary flux of an idea. I don’t have explanations anymore. What does love have to do with talent and success anyway? What is real, what is positive, what is enlightenment, what is spiritual poverty? All I knew was that my mother didn’t love me in the same way that Carol loved me. I never pleased my mother. This saddened me. In the swimming pool I swam until I turned blue. Until the daylight turned into a cool evening. Until everything inside of me, the internal struggle, the inherent disposition that I keep my head up high drowned alongside the inhibitory. The wonderings of love, sympathy, empathy were like a fist.

Fingers clenching and unclenching. I never really understood that love was a journey. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. The end was death. A crossing over into the hereafter. I know what daylight feels like. I knew ever since I was a child that I was different from my mother. Different from my sister. I was the famished interloper. Speech silver. Silence golden. My mother and my sister were both a strange language to me ‘lost in translation’ and in an age of iron. This is for both of them. You can love. You can run. You can win-win-win or lose the game in the end. You can feel pain. You can accept the negativity or you can move on with your life to greener pastures. Accept the pain. Acknowledge the negativity. You can quit while you’re still ahead. I still love the most important people in my life. Carol, Mr Vincent Rhodes, my beautiful sister, and my elegant and sophisticated mother. There is always history when it comes to love. As much as love can be emptiness, it can also be pure. Never forget that it can also heal you. Sadness for most of my life has been this light in my heart. I can remember having this feeling inside of me for the longest time, ever since I was a child. When I think of people I want to climb a tree and hide away amongst its branches. Branches that would provide me with both a mask and a shield against the world. More people if they climbed trees to pray in trees would discover that true loneliness is just another death. Another body in half-light. Perhaps it is just this idea of Carol, wise, arrogant and Mr Vincent Rhodes, with his handsome face, my sister and my mother lovely in their summer dresses, scarf at their throat, magazine hair, accessories, accessories, accessories (perfume, bangles, earrings, all dolled up with heavy peacock-blue eyeshadow, creamy pink lipstick, painted lips, smile, exotic talons for nails) looking like they stepped out of a catalogue.

After all, perhaps it is I who is the arrogant one, who is dumb and who says hurtful things. Perhaps it is I who walked out on them when I said hurtful things. When I didn’t get out of bed until two in the afternoon. I had blue days and blue nights (if you can understand that). I experienced numbing highs and crushing lows. Bipolar can do that to you. It is almost like having two of everything even two souls. I am almost afraid to love. To like, that’s within my grasp. That I can deal with on any day of the week but love, that’s something else altogether. I am tenderness. I am a nomad. Yes, you can see things that aren’t there. On the good days you can write. Epic poems. Prose poems. Love poems. You can even write books. Books that you sell to family and friends. Books that nobody will read. On the bad days, the terrain is hellish. Believe me, you will want boundaries, and everything and anything can set you off. It is quite easy to understand and accept the terms of bipolar. That one day you can be you, the best of you and the next you are the most obstinate, intolerant person in the world. Only you find your jokes funny.

I am bound to these four people. The most important people in my life. Carol, Mr Vincent Rhodes, my sister and my mother. It’s a sacred bond. I can say that now since I have left my insecure, doubting Thomas twenties behind me. I had been full of good luck, fire, and desire in my twenties. Grief and loss cooled me in my early thirties. I am a storyteller. I am a poet. I will do things like that until my death. Until all of life empties out of my soul. Until my last breath. I have made promises. I have made mistakes. In return they have shaped and returned to me my innocence because without innocence, you can never believe in anything. I’ve counted on every image in my life giving everything living in and of itself back to me. It has served me well as inspiration, imagination, creativity, skill, and perfection. Without believing and knowing that you craft and create perfection as an artist, it will leave you lost, hopeless, helpless and a little at a loss for words. It has made a painter of dreams out of me as well as a dreamer. I know what the meaning of survival is now. It’s simply two words. Let go. In my twenties I had identity crisis after identity crisis. I struggled to know who I was. Was I the girl from a small city by the sea, or was I the woman in the big city who understood what that life world and experience was about.

Daily a bipolar life is either a storm in a teacup or a sandstorm. There are days when everything hurts. You drink from the cup until nothing is left of the lukewarm liquid that fills you with a milky comfort and warmth. Memories of being in your paternal grandmother’s house in the afternoons after school. After that, the veil rises and you understand this is as good as its going to get.

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Abigail George has two books in the Ovi Bookshelves,
"All about my mother" & "Brother Wolf and Sister Wren"
Download them, NOW for FREE HERE!