bipolar

Sunrise, Sunset

The sun was coming up, burning through the haze over the Hollywood Hills, turning the sky into a bruised palette of pinks and purples. I was awake because I hadn’t slept. Again. I sat on the balcony of the apartment I never really decorated, smoking a cigarette that tasted like chemicals, watching the city blink itself awake, the lights below flickering out one by one. It felt like dying in reverse.

Inside, my phone buzzed. Messages piling up. People I didn’t care about asking if I was okay, because they hadn’t heard from me. I thought about answering, maybe saying something clever or cruel, but I didn’t have the energy for either.
I took another drag, watching the sun crawl higher, and tried to remember the last time I saw a sunset.

It’s all circles. Endless loops. I have four seasons, just like the world. Four faces. Four masks. And they spin around and around, never letting me rest. I named them once, a long time ago, when I thought naming things gave you power over them.

Dawn is when I burn. When the world is golden and shimmering and so am I. Everything glows, everything makes sense. Ideas pour out of me, perfect and beautiful, and I don’t need sleep or food or people because I am everything. The city is mine, the world is mine, and I can make anything happen. I call this one God.

Then midday comes. I’m still on fire, but it’s a different kind of flame, hotter, meaner. I get angry. Everyone is too slow, too stupid, too annoying. The people around me are insects, buzzing distractions, and I want to crush them just to feel them crack. I snap at strangers, start fights with lovers, and everything that felt so perfect in the morning feels cheap and ugly by noon. This one I call Monster.

And then there’s dusk. When I start to crack. When the light gets heavy and cold, and the ideas that danced in my head now mock me, taunt me. It’s when the guilt comes, a wave that crashes over me, pulling me down, burying me in all the mistakes I made, all the things I said when I was God or Monster. I call this one Ghost.

The last is night. The one that stays the longest. The one I can’t escape. When everything goes dark, when my body feels heavy, like I’m filled with concrete. When I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t breathe without it hurting. I lie in bed for days, staring at the ceiling, wishing the world would end, or that I would. But it never does. And neither do I. This one I call Nothing.

I try to track them, to figure out when one will shift into the other. But they don’t listen to me. They spin and spin, four faces on a broken clock, and I just have to wait until they come back around.
I watched the sun crawl across the sky, my cigarette burned to the filter, my fingers numb. It was a new day.
It was always a new day.
Sunrise. Sunset.
Round and round.