University
Mad Love
by Patrick Berlinquette, , December 11, 2005
The first time we had sex was glorious. The weight of God had lifted from my shoulders. My orgasm was an atom bomb exploding and crashing through my soul and when it was over we lay our sweaty bodies against each other and she clung to me. My eyes rolled back into my head, and in that moment I floated up through her and through my roof and up into the atmosphere. Heavenly opera crescendos erupted from the earth as to applaud my great undertaking. Italian women with beautiful voices filled my ears. I could see our naked bodies from the sky, just like those stories of people who die for split seconds and see themselves – stretched out on a gurney or dead in bed. But, like an adrenaline needle shot to my heart, she whispered that she loved me and the sky caved in. I was born again, pulled down, way back down through heaven, through the clouds and into my bed. She told me she loved me and I told her right back but I was lying through my teeth.
I remember looking up at the little sticky glowing stars clinging to my ceiling, still there from when I was eight years old, and smiling. After that sex, my whole life made sense. I had a stupid grin on my face for two days. I’d drag my feet around town and hear every note of nature. I felt drunk and happy and stupid all the time. Most of the trivial shit that used to bother me horribly was suddenly distant and far away. That sex was bleach my brain needed to start over. My brain and conscience were so clean I would have been content with murder.
Her first I love you was so weird and awkward and soon she said it every night. I felt uncomfortable because I didn’t share her feelings. I was constantly waiting for my heart to finally accept her. I wanted to fall into love like a fever.
Like a Trojan horse, she opened up after a few weeks. Right at that perfect moment, right when I would have grabbed her hand and kissed it and looked her in her blue eyes and said, yes, yes I do, I really love you and I want to be with you forever.
Right then she told me she cut herself and she was living with bipolar disorder, so I said so what? We can work through this and none of that even matters.
Two days later I was walking her to my car, and she was wearing tight Capri pants, the kind that just expose the knee to ankle area, and there I saw my red name sliced into her leg. Not cut or sliced or scratched – carved. Weeks passed and I thought maybe this would blow over, maybe the Depakote would kick in and we could forget about all this. Then I saw her manic side.
Bipolar disorder is generally two extremes; mania and depression. Mania begins with strong euphoria, increased energy, activity, and restlessness. Like cocaine, I was told. In mania, one never stops talking, or stops to think. The first time I saw her manic I thought she was on angel dust.
Soon the mania turned into aggressive and ridiculous behaviors due to the fall from mania to a more sane state of mind. This state is considered the most dangerous because the sufferer knows the depression is coming. This sweet girl turned into the coldest and meanest person I knew. This cycle always concluded with a severe crash. The wilder the mania – the harder the fall. Right when I finally fell in love, I fell back out.
Even though the sex became harder and wilder, every time it was over I would always fiend for that high. My eyes stopped rolling back and I stopped dancing in the clouds and soon my atom bomb culmination felt like firecrackers.
Into my unconscious mind bled all of the disappointing things: the scars, cutting, fighting, screaming, lying, cheating.
I became an expert. I could read the curves of her body. The way she carried herself told me which spectrum end she experienced. Quiet, reserved, shy just screamed depression.
Body language told me a crash would happen… tomorrow. Grabbing me by the dick, ripping off my clothes, pushing me down on the floor and riding me was always mania.
The relationship was a trap. Months had passed and sex was the only thing left. And after sex I was never high, I was empty. I was awkward and uninterested. I constantly had revelations - this girl was in the depths of a disorder, she wanted help and I wanted sex. We didn’t talk about mood stabilizers, we talked dirty. I didn’t help her pick out a new shrink, I helped her pick out lingerie.
A ten degree night in February was one of the worst nights of my life. My band had just finished playing and we were packing up our shit, when I realized she was missing. I soon overhead the crowd saying that some girl had started crying and ran out of the club in hysterics.
“She looked upset,” they murmured.
“She looked like she was going to do something terrible,” they laughed.
My head spun. I dropped the cymbals I was carrying and ran out of there, pushing through the crowd fast into the dead winter night to my van, fighting tears. The windows were fogged and iced up. The door was locked so I started screaming at the top of my frozen lungs. Open the fucking door right now please just open the door oh my god.
I remembered her wild mania that night and I knew she must have crashed and burned. Every door was locked up and she always held my keys while we were on stage. I was afraid of what I would see if I managed to get inside. Exhausting my options, I was left to rip open the broken trunk door. It didn’t budge, so, bracing myself with one foot against a taillight I gritted my teeth and pulled. I pulled for all of the shallow hugs and lies. I gritted my teeth for every ignored call and her dangling razorblade earrings.
Springs popped.
The door sighed as the cracks in the glass spider webbed their way up to my trembling hands. The hinges ripped apart and I heard her muffled crying. I saw her crouched into a ball in the passenger seat, trembling, trying to cut her wrists with a shiny piece of metal, but her hands were too shaky. The metal glistened as I exhaled ice and I just stood there in the cold.
I crawled up to her on my hands and knees and said,
“What are you doing? Please, I love you please don’t do this.”
I delicately opened up her clenched fist and took the shiny thing and put it in my jeans pocket. We didn’t talk the whole ride home.
When we got back I drank vodka straight while she went on the computer. I stood at the doorway and said “this is what I do when I’m depressed.” And she laughed.
I lived for the moments when she laughed.
I truly wanted to help her but I didn’t understand what was going on in her mind.
Our eighteen month anniversary was closing in.
A week later she was in a deep depression. I picked her up and she was quiet and stared out the window. Everytime I started a conversation it would end horribly.
When I dropped her off I said I love you with all of my heart. She stared me in the eyes with the same eyes I fell in love with, except now they were blood red with bitterness, red with hatred.
She told me to shut the fuck up and stop, stop, stop because I didn’t mean it. I stammered and screamed and cursed even after she slammed the door, even after she made her way up the dimly lit walk and was well into her house. I sat there with the headlights dimming, rain pattering on the roof. That sex induced coma was miles away.
I woke up at sunrise the next day to dedicate the rest of it to saving our drowning relationship. I did hours of research on bipolar treatment and medication. I even interviewed all of my old psychology professors from my community college. Dr. Kraut with the white beard, he rubbed his belly and laughed and said this is only going to get worse. I was told that I was at the tip of an endless beginning. He started to tell me why but I stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind me.
I got home, locked the door and created the break up lines in my brain. I paced around like a lunatic in the depths of a drug binge, making James Dean speeches to empty rooms.
Straight vodka. Chain smoking.
I picked up the phone and dialed, sweating.
She answered meekly, “hello?”
I breathed heavily, closed my eyes and said honestly,
“It sounds selfish, but it’s too much stress for me.
“I had some of the best times of my life with you.
“I’ll never forget the way you laugh or the first time I saw your eyes.
“You were the first girl I ever loved and,
“I hope you will meet someone, one day, who always has the right thing to say,
“and can always bring out your smile.”
I hung up and stared at the phone.
I woke up hours later to a dial tone blaring, surrounded by empty beer bottles and my cigarette spotted carpet. My room was foreign, ancient land. Where the fuck did a year and a half of my life go? Ah yes, I had been consumed by a relationship that was so unhealthy, I had deteriorated. I stumbled to the bathroom mirror. Gripping the white sink with both hands, I gazed at a stranger. My skin stretched thin over my bones. My collar bone jutted through my white skin. I coughed up blood into the sink.
I will never let this happen again.
And that’s how it went. I gained a profound respect for disorder. I envied, yet felt happy for my friends with normal girlfriends. But I’d always listen to my friends complain about how insane their relationships were and how wild their girls were because they stayed out late and drank, or broke curfew. Or my friends would say, “hey, man, I really don’t know what to do, this relationship is killing me.” And I’d say yea, uh-huh. I know what you mean.
Once in awhile I’ll see her around. We’ll talk about nothing. Awkward catch-up talk. She’ll catch me looking at her breasts but I’m really reading her curves, for I can still sense the oncoming storm. We talk about our lives and shitty jobs and really never make solid eye contact because she’s looking at her shoes. She still wants to have sex in my van, but I don’t need the weight of God on my shoulders.
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