Photo: Me left, our dog Bimbo, and right my brother Curtis 

Alone in a City; staving off the monsters

We don't ask to be born; we just are. Some of us will beg to get out of the contract, however, suicide is never the correct choice and if you are thinking about it, I beg you to get help. I was manic for another eight months, after I left the forest home at the end of June 2006, and this part is about those months leading to the cliff. When mania ends, you hit a wall, and you fall off of a precipice without any means to land softly. When I was about six years old my loving brother Walt told me that if you die in your dreams you'll die in your sleep. "Yeah," said Curt, "You'll die!" I was most likely annoying them with a dream, and they were tired of my annoyance, so they thought they'd scare me away, but not me. I took it as a challenge. I was going to test out their theory that night when I dreamt. I was already a lucid dreamer by that time in my life, and could wake up within a dream, for I was a power dreamer. Nighttime came and I dreamt I was on a cliff, and I thought, jump, and see if you die. I jumped and when I hit the ground, it turned into Jell-O, and I bounced up to the top of the cliff. It was then I realized my brothers were full of it, and they didn't know the truth. I can get into a philosophical discourse on whether life is a dream or is it real, and that would be interesting, but not here, here I'm going to deal with what I know, the tangible parts of life.

At first, living in town was okay. I wasn't far from the behavior center, and I was close to downtown, and a bar. Okay, I didn't drink, but one thing a bar has is people and you have people to chat with. I soon tired of behavioral health outpatient care, and I reduced the service to a once a week meeting with my caseworker. I rented a duplexed house made into two studio apartments. I had no bed as I'd only brought an air mattress, and a sofa to sleep on. The studio had three rooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a small bathroom, so there was nothing to do. I had a laptop, but no internet, so no surfing the net, and I had no cable TV. I'd get up in the morning and head for the bar as soon as it opened, rent my seat by getting a soda, and I'd head home at 1 am. It set up was a lot like Cheers, and my stool was mine alone. I was there long enough to learn about who were the drug dealers and bookies, and that was scary. The bar was high end, and not even my wife and I could afford to eat there when we were together. That was perhaps why I chose it, because there was not much of a chance my wife would ever be there. It was where the rich came to dine and drink, and I was there long enough for them to trust me, and that was too long. I was offered free tickets to football games, was shown a free tour of the city by the owner, and invited to parties, but no one there was my friend; bar friends are friends of the bar, not you.

One dark night, as I lay on my air-mattress I thought I woke up, a sort of false awakening, but not layered with repetitive awakenings that symbolize most hallucinations like that. This was different. I saw a great oak tree in front of me, but it was still dark and I knew I was in my room. A twister hit the tree and ravaged it tore every limb off, but one, and that one limb had leaves, so I knew the tree was still alive. The funny thing about that hypnopompic* dream is my eyes were wide open, and I was wide awake. I reached over to turn on the lamp, and it was only then the vision went away. I realized it was a test of my will, and I was being tested, but when everything was stripped from me I would still be alive, however, I didn't know at that point just how much more could be taken from me. I had one more vision like that, and that time I saw souls of humans ripped from their bodies, hundreds of thousands of them, all in agony, and all traumatic deaths. The night's vision will haunt me for the rest of my life.

I walked with my caseworker when I noticed a pressure feeling in my abdomen, but it would subside, so I didn't worry about it, and for the next two weeks the pressure would come and go. I report the sensation to my caseworker, but it didn't register as anything serious, until one night while lying on my couch. I dug my fingernails into the fabric, and I actually started to eat the material. I am vomiting violently, and at last I give in and call the ER. The cart me in and I'm put in a ward, and I was given a steady drip of morphine. It doesn't do a thing for me, and the pain continues. I had kidney stones, not just one, but I got thousands of them. I was there thirty-six hours before they decided to perform emergency surgery. It seemed one particular large stone would not pass, and it took the magic of a surgeon to relieve me of this pain. It seems that drinking diet Cola sixteen hours a day, for eight months, is not healthy and can create one hell of a kidney stone; the real price for my seat at the bar. I will never return there, no one came to visit me from the bar, even though I had gotten tight with a few of them, I was really alone, with the exception of my brother Walt, the caseworker, and Ava no living soul visits me after I return to the apartment.

I was one of those types of people who needed people around him all the time. Alone in a crowd was fine with me as long as someone was there. Now, I'd come to the end of mania. I was at the deepest depth of my soul could find, and I curled up in a fetal position wishing to die. The end of mania was a terrible place to be. The thing was I could have reached out for help, but I didn't. I withdrew from the world even further.

Last Leaf Remaining

©. Olan L. Smith

Leaves falling from a tree pass by him;

Cousins, friends and neighbors, and he watches them

Twirl down from his tree until they carpet the ground.

He hangs on in the cold breeze

Waiting his turn. The old man picks up a book

And squints, or positions his loupe in front of it

Reading one word at a time in complacency,

A constant reminder of aging. The old man

Rises from his rocking chair and they listen

As his bones crack and pop; his crackly voice utters

Swear words, "Damn! Fires-a-blazon,

I did not ask for this." Only survivors

Are allowed to curse their pain.

A multitude of friends die, turned to so

Much mulch for fertilizer. With friends and family

Gone, what is there to live for? Who desires coddling?

An old man? Cane in hand, he slowly makes his

Way shuffling his feet, slowing down. The youthful

Ones who hang on to his every word for one

Bit of wisdom to spill from his mouth,

And they jot it down in hopes of gain; enlightenment

That will not come. Another chum schemes to steal

His wealth, but he has none; his treasure is his mind,

Close to his bosom, his words written down for the ages.

Come youth know that understanding

Is earned by simply surviving. No soul becomes wise

By wishful thinking, you cannot skim the surface, leaf

Pages of life, and hope wisdom wears off,

Or think by osmosis it will transfer, wait your turn.

Hang on for all you are worth and it will come.

*Hypnopompia (coined by Frederic W. H. Myers, means sleep wakening) is not really a dream, and it occurs as you begin to wake during a sleep cycle. It is the surface between wake and sleep as your mind cycles from deep to light sleep. This experience is at the tip of the wave where your mind wants to pierce the surface of consciousness, but the person asleep is not in REM eye movement, and therefore is not dreaming. It is a period of time between wake and sleep where you're in a nether world where unconscious and conscious minds share reality, or you might call it the meditative realm humans seek in deep meditation. In this domain you have visions, a long sought after realm by visionaries, but it can be a scary place for novice people. You can reach this realm accidentally driving on a long, lonely, straight highway, or you have them and you'll call them night terrors, or you can also get locked into them by what is called sleep paralysis. Whatever it is called humans don't know much about it, but it is not something to fear. For me, this is where I find solace, but it just depends on who you are.

https://youtu.be/Oob_Yc_EytM