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Right after the winter solstice the sun is weak and a bleary yellow glow, faint and frosty trimmed and garlanded by gray tufts of atmosphere and icy blue bits of sky. I sit, a small lonely figure, in the dim gloom of my apartment brightened only by the glitter of colored Christmas lights burning on my plastic, green, tinseled and decorated Christmas tree.
I am not so much enlightened by the depths of winter, not now anyway. My thoughts spring back to Halloween, when the air was just beginning to chill, and miniature, harmless, four-year-old goblins dotted the streets of Norwood, gripping in their tiny hands orange and black bags of chocolates and lollipops. I fell into the autumn haze that day easily traveling home from Manhattan to spend the evening with my husband. We ate Milky Ways and watched the Greenwich Village parade on TV. Not one of those goblins knocked on our door. We ate the candy meant for them ourselves.
It was a quiet, restful evening. But even as I stared steadily at the TV screen, I could not help but think of a Halloween night in 2004, when, alone in my apartment, I went on a wild adventure of demonic proportions.
I had not slept for two weeks. In the wee hours of Halloween morning I walked five miles to a nondescript post office in Washington Heights a few miles away to mail a letter. I reasoned that my neighborhood mailboxes were unsafe, so at six o’clock in the morning, after another sleepless night, I headed out in the darkness and walked through the West Bronx, over the 225th Street Bridge, and wandered into Manhattan, where I believed mail was delivered as it should be.
Somehow my parents were able to contact me by cell phone, and they picked me up and bought me lunch at a diner. I was hallucinating wildly, filled with grandiose thoughts about my power and intelligence.
It was about ten o'clock in the evening when the chaos began. One moment I was sitting in front of the television, the next I was storming through the apartment overturning tables and chairs, knocking knickknacks off surfaces, pulling down bookcases, tearing picture frames off the walls. My mother retreated to the hallway and called 911. I was escorted to the emergency room. The mad energy continued as six policemen struggled to hold me down. I flailed at them, scratching and kicking. There was blood. I threw the gurney I was lying on across the room. The five foot two inches of me had found the strength of a very strong man. It did not take long for the psychiatrists to sedate me and whisk me up to the psych ward. The doctors were reticent to release me since I could only sleep under the influence of Atavan and still woke at the crack of dawn to buzz about the psych ward like a frenetic loose wire.
I speak of this not with pride but with trepidation and fear. What is to stop this from happening again?
Back home, the apartment had been put back together by the concerned hands of my mother and sister. It had been no small task. On seeing what I had done, my brother commented that a demolition team could not do what I had done on my own in fifteen minutes. He said the place was not only trashed, but carefully and methodically trashed, which leads me to believe that there is more organization and order in psychosis than we may be aware of.
The reason for my psychosis is simple: I had gone too low on my medication. Aware of that, I now take the prescribed amount faithfully.
My husband's presence helps to stabilize my life. The thought that he turns the key in the lock of the front door every night gives me a feeling of security. He is some sort of gift and for this I gladly cook his dinner, bring his clothes to the cleaners and iron his shirts. When he works late and I am alone, I turn to the computer, feeling that a rampage of words is all that I need to insure my sanity.