i am empty.

depressed. bored? uninspired. questioning everything about my life. this is normal. for myself anyhow.

at this point i do nothing and am nothing. ok there's graduate school. the class is multicultural education. i don't have anything inside of me that wants to come out about that. all i have right now is what i am feeling and the dreams i manage to remember. today there were none specific, except something about a rope ladder. ha. maybe i am the one on the rope ladder and it's about to break and it is strung between two cliffs and i have no idea what is below it because of the fog.

i was manic for a period this summer. over the fourth of july holiday. i was convinced i was being followed by an old friend. earlier he and i had had some conversations, more talk of what was previously talked about a year before (that of my going to visit him). then the mania took hold. the weed may have had something to do with it, but i was out of control. i believed (or at least said it was part of the story that i was writing in my head) that he was a song writer and had managed to get all the songs he had written onto my mp3 player. the songs were all about me. i realize that this is not true, but the songs took on meanings of their own. kind of like they all started to make sense and they were all about the same universal theme: love. at one point i also imagined he was somehow connected to franz ferdinand and all of franz's songs were about the same thing too (he WAS vantango, from the song on their bonus CD).

i was sick.
i was exposed.
i was lucky i bounced between husband and mom and didn't make any new friends. i would have been friends with anyone, i thought they were all involved. involved in the grand scheme to put me and him together. i thought even husband was involved, that he had been paid off to marry me and keep me safe and hidden until the time was right. he had been paid off to keep me a secret.

i remember having a distinct fantasy, a vision if you will. i may still retain photographic evidence, though it will be on the hard drive (purchased with mania) i bought this summer. the fantasy (i was high at the time and doodling on a mirror with a dry erase marker) was that i was from this irish guild and was reincarnated as who i am today. that this is why i can crochet, this is why i have an artistic side to me. that he was once an italian artist or something like that, a designer's apprentice. and that we were meant to find each other again. what i doodled on the mirror really had nothing to do with my fantasy, i was indulging my manic propensity to document everything. somehow everything was so important and i wanted to share every moment. with him. by uploading photos to the internet.

this was my mania.
my manic episode
my delusions
and i don't even know how much he saw.
now that i am in a saner frame of mind i would like to know.

for instance, i want to know if something really did happen, or if i made it up, told it to a friend, forgot about it, and had that friend ask me about it.

the last time i saw him we had argued over whether i would go to his house for the night. i would not. i refused because he had a girlfriend at the time. so he drove me half way home, and i got in a taxi the rest of the way. i did not arrive back to the place i was staying until sunrise. this was because the taxi driver appeared to be a senile old man. he had to stop three times to ask for directions. in the fever of my delusions, i supposed that my friend had paid the taxi driver to get lost, in the hopes that i would get frustrated and call him to come to pick me up. i was talking with an old girlfriend of mine one night while i was high when i told her all about this guy. in my delusions i kept getting confused, thinking that he was hacking into her chat account and talking to me though her. so i was saying things to her that were really meant for him. a couple of times my friend had to stop me and say WHAT? and i would giggle and say "not in a sexual way, silly!" i was manic so the conversation continued ad infinitum, my thinking i was really talking to him, and then i tired my friend and was talking to myself. or i moved onto some other poor soul who was still up and online, still thinking i was talking to someone besides the person who was really talking to me.

i'm pretty sure i made up the part about the tachero being bribed. and there is no way my girlfriend had any contact with my friend because she would have told me.

of course mixed in with all this were the real conversations, by internet, that i managed to have with the object of my delusions. because i kept talking to people who i thought were him, i have no idea what things i told him, i have no idea what he knows and what he said to me and what i made up on my own. when i was at my granddad's house, someone was talking to me who said they wrote the da vinci code, that they had "pooped on a toad." i told the person, thinking it was mister delusion subtly asking my forgiveness for fucking something up (or somebody), that he should wait to see what the toad does, then clean up his mess. i proceeded to tell about a time when i was a young child, i had taken a dump outside in the yard and our neighbor had stepped in it. then whoever i was talking to cheerfully led me into a "good night."

sometimes i feel like i saw too much, like i got too close to the sun, too high, saw too much truth, and am still having a hard time coming back down. husband unfortunately was left clear out of my delusions, but he was there to rein me back in when i needed it. i wasn't sleeping. and if i was it was maybe an hour each night. i would get in bed, feel restless, then get up and do something else. there was one night i got up and went into the bathroom with two dry-erase markers, a camera and a tripod. i wrote silly things on the mirror and drew mermaids (my personal joke with myself that was meant for him - nada - swim to get to me, and also, nothing). this time the fantasy was that i was somebody's inspiration - that i was the inspiration behind a movie that was being made. all the pictures i took had that look, i didn't pose for the camera but instead looked like a director taking still shots on a movie set. of course the movie was the breakdown of my mind.

the movie theme must be common in bouts of mania. one of my delusional fantasies was that he was connected to a movie that was currently being made, or being written. that i was the inspiration for the main character. it didn't help the mania that a well known young director was in his country making a movie. that was one of the dots in my web. another dot connected to the movie fantasy was this: once while driving down to my mother's house i passed a grey bus that had "la fuga (the escape)" painted on the rear. as if were a tour bus for a band that was somehow involved in this delusional movie. i smiled and laughed and made the hang ten sign with my hand as i drove past them.