"Carry Me Away"
Song by: John Mayer
Hypomania is known to be a very dangerous color on the bipolar spectrum, but Sarabeth once said that is beauty, and the anxious ticking climb of a rollercoaster, and the jitter in your fingertips, and a deep yearning for pleasure that won’t feel perfect but so close. She told me it was her favorite beastly color.
A few years back Sarabeth told me about how she stayed at her grandparent’s farm when she was starting ti feel like the city had too much energy. Her grandparents didn’t live on the farm anymore, but she said that at the farm the wallpaper talks like grandpa, and the floorboards nag like grandma and the whole scene grounds her. I don’t know think they know she went there, or that she was even supposed to.
She told me, “they showed me where they planted the key years ago, and I’ve dug it out of the potted fern time and time again.” She replants it when her nerve endings start to wilt to depression.
She was at her hideaway on a beautiful day in May that turned to a whipping storm. She told me this story of drinks. She said, “the radio under the kitchen cabinet roared with warnings. The repetitive tornado alarm served as my own siren call, she beckoned. I put on my best sundress, red lipstick, and took my underwear off. I probably should have realized I was manic then.”
She had written down her account of that chaotic day. Her journal was filled with snippets of Emily Dickinson style phrases. One read, “I played in the damp air of the old house and slow-danced through the hallways.” It wouldn’t surprise me if one day Sarabeth told me that she too was in love with ‘Death’.
“Food seemed useless, and opening the windows in the old bedrooms to listen to the birds gave me all the nutrition I could ever need, use, or want. Not long after the clock in the parlor chimed that it was four in the afternoon did I realize the birds were no longer chirping.” Sarabeth barely took a breath, sputtering all th words out.
She said, “I walked outside to show off my flawless Parisian beauty to the empty fields, but broaching clouds made it feel like walking into a swamp. The storm hadn’t yet arrived. The sun was beyond bright and the grass moved in waves.” Then she paused, “how did I describe it?” She shuffled through her notebook and read, “The blades asked me to join them for a swim, and I obliged.”
She kept reading, “The sky was dimming while I bathed in the grass; a front paddled its way across the never-ending sky.” She laughed and commented, “Maybe mania was finally rearing its head in me, maybe I was just feeling the same energy as the lightning that so desperately wanted to crack into the atmosphere, but the rain spoke to me and promised to cleanse me of all my wrong-doings.”
Sarabeth was on a roll now and couldn’t stop talking, “The storm told me it could blow away all the regrets, all the mistakes, and all the anger everyone had with me. My sundress flirted with the gusts and my hair rippled around my head as I walked further into the Missouri prairie grass, like finally giving into temptations to meet the graceful mistress.”
“About an acre walk from the field was a big tree that marked where my grandpa once started his soy planting years before. The big tree became the place of my destiny,” her words were liquid and slipping in and out of lucidity.
“Wait, I wrote something really good about this I remember. Where is it… here, ‘Once upon a time, my cousins and I would race to that tree, none of us tall enough to see who was winning as our bare feet pounded the solid ground. I walked to it that day in slow, deliberate steps; like a bride to the altar.’ Damn, I’m good.”
Sarabeth took a sip of her tequila soda that she ordered even though it was 2pm on a Thursday. She paged through her notebook and found another passage which she read aloud, “The rain started when I was only a few pews away from the tree’s roots. The swampy air turned cold and my skin smiled with sweet goosebumps. My stomach turned with excitement and my feet were hot. I stood and stared at the opening sky and titled my head back. I baptized myself in the troubling storm. The distant air raid siren sang its melody and my hot feet tapped in the mud.
I galloped to the tree and sat at its roots facing southwest. Grandma always said that the southwest corner was the safest part of the basement in a tornado because they usually came from that direction. With that logic, I thought my spot would give me a prime vantage point for what would take away the grief I caused by my own existence.”
Sarabeth started to wane into melancholy, and she took another sip. “I wish I could describe it without writing it out, but it was like the tornadic clouds pulled and peeled and pushed against each other miles and miles away. I pressed my back against the bark and wrapped my arms behind me so far that I could feel the moss on the other side. The clouds dipped low, and way beyond me, way beyond the old soy field, but not far from the silo. The cleansing force kissed the ground and twirled with glee, destroying nothing but dirt and dust. I fell in love with that tornado; a destructive beauty feared by so many, including me.
The storm dissipated as it crossed the highway in the distance, but it gave me a parting kiss with a final gust that whipped my hair around my face. I dripped with rain on my way back to the house, and sang through the hallways.”
The icy drink that Sarabeth had been playing with created a puddle under the glass. She tried to push it back and forther between her shaky fingertips but it got caught in the friction of condensation and nearly spilled. After catching the glass she lifted it up to take a sip and said, “I remember what happened after that storm. I was still on such a high, I opened every window that I hadn’t already. I wanted the clean air run through the old rooms. Then, I laid on the trundle bed that I used to sleep on when I stayed at the farm as a kid. I wrote a love letter.”
I asked if she still had it. She laughed. She said she didn’t nor would she ever want to read it, not anymore. I nodded. She told me that she started lithium after the tornado. She finished her drink and said, “Probably for the best.”
I miss Sarabeth.
