Dancing on Broken Glass

I'm sure that sounds odd, but looking at me and seeing me are two very different things.

I know the difference between sadness and depression. Clinical depression has no source from which it springs-it just is. Intractable sadness has nothing to do with synapses, or brain chemistry, or essential salts, it's born of something. It's the product of injustice and helplessness. It can be anesthetized, I suppose, but it's there, unaltered, when the medication wears off, like an intruder who has broken into your house and is still there every morning when you wake up. Given the choice, I would rather be depressed. I've come back from depression.

I think the overriding message would be that love is serious business. True, down-to-the-crap love is not for the shallow or faint of heart. People are messy. Marriage is messy. You have to bring your best self to the game despite your limitations.

That's my life: continually stepping up to and away from the edge of a hole that is by turn fascinating and terrifying- filled with whatever my faulty imagination dictates at any given time. It is absolutely imperative that I keep my distance, but the closer I get, the better I feel. Or the worse, And that's the ridiculous irony because I am compulsively drawn to this danger, and the closer I get, the closer I want to be. Those depths hold unimaginable escape-at times utter exhilaration, at others, pain so intense I can't begin to describe it. Either way the edge calls to me with it's lies that sound like promises. Soft seductive lies that I can't always resist.

I want to be more productive, funnier, better, and I can do all that while I'm climbing. But I can't sustain it. I have to crash. And I know the crash is coming, I can taste it, but I can't stop it. Well actually I can, but I always think I have more time to stop it, until I don't. And then I fall-fast and hard-and disappoint just about everybody.

Broken glass. At the moment, we were barefoot and dancing over a sea of it. But as true as that was, Mickey knew I would dance with him forever if I could, bloody feet and all.

Il medico di Mickey mi guardò per qualche istante poi fece un profondo respiro. « Lucy, ogni matrimonio è una danza; a volte complicata, a volte deliziosa, il più delle volte senza eventi rilevanti. Ma con Mickey ci saranno momenti in cui la vostra danza sarà sui vetri rotti. Sarà dolorosa. O fuggirete da questo dolore o vi terrete ancora più stretti e danzerete su questi vetri fino a un punto meno accidentato. »

It takes some skill to navigate this disorder. It takes some grit to control it so it doesn't control me. Sometimes it takes a guide. For me it takes a destination. Lucy is my destination. Whether I'm cowered in a dark corner or perched on a blindingly bright plateau, my aim is always to get back to her.

Sometimes, like when she got sick, the edge comes to me. Sometimes that happens for no reason. The chasm widens inexplicably even as I run from it-run for my life-until the ground beneath me evaporates and I am lost again despite my best, but futile efforts.

I think he'll have to lose you Lucy. He won't know what he can do without you until he's without you.

Her heart is beating inside me. She moves inside me. She gets the hiccups inside me. Aborting her now is no different in my mind than waiting until she’s born and smothering her with a pillow, or throwing her in the lake on her third birthday, or shooting her in the head when she’s twelve.” Priscilla

Get off the stage, my friend,” he told me. “This is not about you, or being bipolar. You are like any other person in this sad situation—no more than a spectator forced to endure a tragedy. What you’re doing is an issue of character, Michael, not pathology.