Topographia (top-o-graf’-i-a): Description of a place. A kind of enargia [: {en-ar’-gi-a} generic name for a group of figures aiming at vivid, lively description].
Inside my brain I have pictures, swirling smoke, flashing lights, and broken dreams. The pictures are like Polaroids with blurry images poorly composed—parts cut off, my thumb in middle, blank—basically undecipherable, no memory triggers: just there, filling up a part of my consciousness with no meaning except the puzzle of absence with a presence.
The smoke is smoldering memories borne on brain cells clenching time—squeezing out the liquid drops of beginnings ill founded and tangled in cords of hope never realized. Flashing lights bear hypnotic seductions cascading in every shade to dress my soul with vibrancy and the illusion of beauty where there is only a surface ugly without color, dim and nearly invisible. My broken dreams are piled, almost cracking my skull and giving me headaches without end, remorseless, grinding, debilitating.
But alongside all of this is the medication, soaking my brain with a promise. If I take it, it will take me to a non-bipolar, non-PTSD paradise, where everything goes into neutral and I walk slowly and have mild tremors—my fork bounces up and down, my lips quiver. A small price to pay to still the crazy urges and extract me from peril. But, I can’t carry my feeling foward. I take the first step and then turn and run at the first sign of connecting. I can’t carry through. I won’t carry through. I can’t get close. I won’t get close. I won’t begin, so I won’t end.
For me, life is a series of beginnings. Continuity is an unachievable illusion. I just wait for “until death do us part.” Or, we just “part” out of boredom or anger. Living is losing, but it does not make it not worthwhile. In most cases, holding on is futile and painful too. Just fade out—letting go is the honorable thing to do. If you’re as lucky as I am, slopping around in a medicated stew, you’ll always be nowhere, nested in aporia like a big brainless bird.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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