Читать книгу Madness: A Bipolar Life - Marya Hornbacher - Страница 14

Michigan, 1989

I’m sitting in the study lounge, it’s five A.M., and I have no idea how many nights or days have gone by since I last slept. I’m starving, I’m writing, I can’t stop, don’t want to stop, don’t want to eat, I am possessed by words. I’m at boarding school, an art school where students not yet eighteen spend ten hours a day, six days a week, training, practicing, studying harder than even seems possible, possessed by a desire to make it, to succeed, and I’m surrounded by open books on the study lounge table, my typewriter pouring out a short story, a paper, another, another. I am no longer a fuckup, I’m going to make it, I’m going to ace my classes, I’m going to stay awake forever if I have to, just so long as I write this, whatever it is.

Through the window that looks out over the snowy campus, the light is coming up. The snow is lit a violet-blue, the horizon’s a red-orange line. I sit back in my chair, my body buzzing, this heavenly hum in my head. Paper in stacks on the table. I’m ready for workshop, a fistful of stories in my hand. I’ve read everything for class that I was supposed to and then some. Physics thrills me, math confounds me, the German teacher despairs, but the English teacher, the writer-in-residence, the staff writers who pound us with work, they pull me aside and say: Read it, write it, don’t stop, you’ve got it, you’re going to make it. The magic words, the promise. The hope.

I just give up sleep. I’ve noticed by now that maybe my moods get a little crazier with sleep deprivation. Never mind. The deprivation unleashes a chemical reaction that feeds on itself, so that the less I sleep at night, the less I can sleep the next night, and the next. Night and day reverse themselves—but I’m not going to sleep during the day either. My body clock is no longer keeping time.

I don’t care. The future is unfurling ahead of me. I’m going to be a writer if it kills me. I will kill myself trying, I will get there, I’ve got to learn it, train for it, write it until the writing is perfect, until I get it, until I make it, I’m going to be real. This time I won’t fuck it up. I won’t fail.

The sun crests the horizon halfway, a winter sun, a blinding white. I stagger from the study lounge, carrying my piles of papers and books, and stumble down the stairs and into my room. My roommate is still asleep, the room still in shadow. As she mumbles in her sleep, I pull on my running shoes, go out into the cold, head across campus to the classroom building with the half-mile-long hall.

I run. Time stops. Thoughts stop. The never-ending pounding of my blood, the energy that surges through me all the time these days, it never runs out, I feel as if I will explode with it, I run. Up and down the long hall, compulsively touching the cold metal door on each end, must touch it or it doesn’t count, one mile, five miles, ten miles, chanting thinner, thinner, thinner, I am killing myself with the running, the starving, but I am alive, I run in the morning, between classes, during lunch, after school, during dinner, after workshops, before bed, and when I stop, I panic, afraid that until I run again, the flesh will creep back on my body. I’ve got to burn it off, get down to bones, a running, writing, starving skeleton, I eat only carrots and mustard, drink gallons of coffee, chatter with my friends, who tell me to stop, who worry, but they don’t understand, the flesh is always encroaching, trying to drown me, I will be thin, clean bones.