“Distance is not for the fearful, it is for the bold. It’s for those who are willing to spend a lot of time alone in exchange for a little time with the one they love. It’s for those knowing a good thing when they see it, even if they don’t see it nearly enough. The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. Distance means so little when someone means so much.””

Today- again- I said goodbye to my boyfriend at the airport.

Ow. Ouch. My heart. This hurts.

Goodbyes suck, and we are getting better at them- because now we know we'll always come back. We live 12 hours away, and goodbyes are a normal part of routine for us. But I will never not cry as I watch him walk away. I will never not run after his car for one last kiss every time, even as he's driving away, and then run down the road watching him go, waving and blowing kisses and yelling, "I love you."

We usually fight right before he leaves. I get mad at him for something- generally something vague- and then, as always, we work it out, sometimes painfully, and every time it comes down to the psychological summation of "I got angry at you because you're leaving me. I know it's not your fault. But I am mad that you are so far away. I am mad that you are leaving me again."

My dad died when I was very young, and my relationship past has had traumatic endings, so abandonment issues are kind of a thing. However, they're not an excuse. One thing we've learned over the course of ten months (ten months!) is how to talk through our problems- and, more often than not, they are moreso feelings and miscommunications than actually problems at all. I remember right after we first started dating Jesse said something to me I'll always remember.

We were at the beach, drinking with friends, and I had had my feelings hurt by something. I was sitting by myself, and he walked away from our friends to sit down next to me. He asked me to talk about what was wrong. I knew I didn't have a reason to be upset (I think I was jealous of something), and I checked my emotion, because I knew it was unfair. I told him we didn't need to talk about it, I just have problems, and sometimes I feel ways that don't make sense. Jesse looked at me and said in a very concerned voice, "But your problems are our problems. Your problems are my problems too. Whatever it is, I want to work through it with you and be part of it."

After years of regarding my emotions as illegitimate (I have Bipolar Disorder), I had never heard anything like that in my life. He knew that what I was feeling didn't make sense, but it didn't matter. He still thought it was legitimate, because I felt it. He still thought it mattered, because it affected me. He still decided to care, because I cared.

It is easy, as a woman, to say, "I'm PMSing, I'm sorry." And it is tempting, and often necessary, as someone with Bipolar Disorder and Anxiety Disorder to say, "I feel upset and I don't know why. It is not because of you. I am sorry." It is easy to say, "My emotions can be so irrational." Often this is true, and I had always thought this- I learned it was essential to recognize these moods and think this way if I was going to retain healthy friendships. To treat every emotion I felt as valid was not only suicide, but also kind of terrifying.

At first I told Jesse he was wrong. He didn't understand, when you have a mental illness you feel things that just don't line up with reality. I've learned to mentally parent myself by noticing this, identifying it, and vocalizing that I am experiencing a disconnect so that I don't project these feelings on my surroundings. That made my life easier. With most people.

But not with Jesse. Jesse cared. He didn't understand how you could love someone and not care. He didn't understand how anything I felt, anything, could just "not count" because I decided my brain was malfunctioning. Often I took that as an easy way out. In past relationships, I had done so for years. "It's just an episode," I would explain. And by saying that, I was able to protect myself from addressing and sharing my true feelings.

Nobody ever got to know me. I was safe from hurting others. I was safe from being hurt. I felt like whatever I felt was just "broken," and sometimes, that's partially true. But the psyche is not a hardware machine. Emotions are far more complex than black-or-white malfunctions. Everything is layered. Everything is intricately tied up with who I am, my past experiences, my perception of life, and the way I perceive the world to be.

That scares me so much that I could never share it with a friend or a significant other- I could never even share that with myself.

I don't know how to describe having Bipolar. It's like you wake up every day, and you never know who you're going to be. You wake up every day and you might wake up as a different person. It's like the lottery, and you never know what you're gonna get. Some days you wake up with five million dollars, some days you wake up with $5, and some days you wake up in crippling debt. Except instead of money, that debt is your brain's serotonin.

When I'm manic, it feels like I'm on acid. Everything is unspeakably beautiful. I go to bookstores and stay for 12 hours then don't remember how I got there. I spend hours making friends with strangers. I spend $34 of printer funds mass-producing flyers that say "TIME ISN'T REAL." I stop in the middle of the street and just stare at the moon because it is the most beautiful juxtaposition of shape and colors I've ever seen.

I am late to class because I can't stop touching every single magical flower and they all feel like they sing to me. I stay up late into the night writing poetry, climbing on roofs, or reading academic journals at the library which are not even related to my classes, and every second feels like ecstasy. Colors are brighter. It feels like bliss.

I make plans, often, starting-off ironically, to change career paths or to make someone famous. I constantly feel like I'm right on the brink of deciphering the underlying meaning of the universe, my purpose for living, the most utmost thing. I talk a lot, to strangers. Questions about the meaning of life seem pressingly fascinating to me, and also hilarious. Existence seems hilarious. My persona, and my ability to act as "Alice" through it, seems hilarious. Everything about it. We are so small. I speak in very grandiose terms, and I forget boundaries. I have zero self-checking procedure or insecurity. I feel- no, I know- I could do anything I ever wanted, if I tried. "Invincible" is an understatement. Inanimate objects smile wryly at me. I don't mine.

I started to notice this was bad when I decided it would be really funny if I just went and stood in traffic.

That would 100% kill me.

I love being manic. I only need four hours of sleep a night, and I feel fantastic. Every second I am superhuman. Simply existing has a palpable quality to it which can only be described as analogous to drugs- the best drugs ever known to mankind. Life is absurd, hilarious, and beautiful. Life is your playground. Above all, it is yours.

It's not all bad, honestly. People say Bipolar is a terrible thing, but I really enjoy manic episodes. They make me do irresponsible things, but I have learned mechanisms of self-check, and I have learned to appoint a, uh... "babysitter" to help keep track of where I am since I will wander off indefinitely, but I am alive when I am manic, and it feels beautiful. I feel like the most Alice I have ever been. I feel like the most extreme, most genuine version of me.

The part that's bad is when it stops.

You can't move. You can't get out of bed. You feel nothing. You feel panic. You feel drop-black dread as you stretch suspended and exposed over the cosmic void, hungry to swallow you at every moment. There are dark shadows, literally, everywhere in your peripheral vision. Everyone you meet is out to get to you. Especially that man at the bus stop. Also your friends. Also that wall.

It's hell.

It's a hell you can't talk yourself out of, and all you can do is keep performing simple repetitive moments- I like to play a Wii game called Burger Island- to remind yourself that you are in your body, and all you need to do is keep existing, keep existing, even though it hurts, because you are not dying, and it will stop. If I am really losing my mind I just force myself into manual labor or Burger Island. If things are even more dire, I tend to try to create Kanye West death hoax conspiracies on the internet as an attempt at reviving my will to live. That's when you know things are bad, is when I message you and ask if you can retweet that Kanye is dead.

Kanye's fake death is the crucible for my consciousness and the vehicle through which I hope to redeem myself with the world and, once again, touch it, feel it, be in it, like a normal person with normal sensory perception could.

There's nothing rational about depression, any more than there is mania. Depression sometimes comes with voices. You feel really sure somehow that someone who is trying to trick you has put cameras in your room. They are all making fun of you. You shouldn't go to class, because everyone will know and they will laugh at you. You shouldn't even go outside or let anyone see you, because they will see you for who you really are- and that person is a disgusting thing, a sub-human thing, that barely qualifies as a person- it is inherently unlovable, inadequate, incapable of Being correctly.

You walk to 711 and are seized with bone-chilling terror as a man walks past you. He was going to rape you, but thinks you are too gross and it's funny to him. The woman behind the counter is obviously laughing at you for always being there and for the way you are moving around. She notices everywhere you move. You can't hide from her. They are all watching you, every second, every movement, and every movement you make is embarrassing and wrong. You literally forget how to operate your own body. You don't remember how to properly orient yourself around a door, or near a counter, or in an aisle- you feel like you're floating. Your body doesn't feel like you. Your hands look very far away. You can't open a packet of Splenda. You don't know why, but you can't.

Everyone is watching you, and you don't remember how you would open them before. Your hands are shaking because you are so scared and you are trying to act like you know how to open a packet of Splenda. You fake confidence and try to turn off the thoughts-within-thoughts which is the temperamental wavelength of your brain. You feel like you're on drugs- very hard drugs, very bad drugs- and everything is wrong. This is not what it feels like to be a person. You don't remember how to think in patterns, perform tasks, or be a person. You can't escape the black horror and dread. You tell yourself, "I feel disassociated. I feel like I am watching myself outside my own body." You get confused trying to find a pen in your backpack, and you legitimately don't remember how to open it. You feel like you are dead, or about to die, or whatever it is that you are feeling- being human does not feel like this. It's like you're in a machine you don't know how to operate, and you are blind at the wheel.

Everything looks alien- there are winding paths where you didn't remember, desks have sharp and jagged corners, your friend's text is confusing and "Hey what's up" feels like an attack.

This is a horrific, dysphoric existence that is almost impossible to survive. When I am in this state, surviving is the key goal. Functioning, or constructing some appearance of functionality, is simply a plus.

I don't know how to explain to anyone what it feels like to be terrified of your own mind.

I am terrified of my own mind. I love my mind and all the wonderful attributes it gives me, which make me the exceptional person I am. But what scares me, fundamentally, about my mind is that I cannot control it. My perception of reality genuinely can't be trusted. I never know when it's going to change. I do not have a "normal." It is incredibly hard to traverse the universe with an erratic compass, let alone without a map.

This is what it's like to be me. This fluctuating state of being so fundamentally unstable forever formidably holding the knife of self-awareness to my throat- I live in the interim, in moments, in fragments, in bold flashes of color, in dark, garish sears of a vortex-swimming hell. I live my life in photographs. In jarring laughs of awkward cadence which are just the soul rippling to exude joy. I live it in bad binges where every moment you think, and almost wish, you might die, because everything feels so sharp and invasive that you don't think a singular identity consciousness can stand it and you almost do not want to.

I have discounted these hell storms of hyper-sentience from any credence of logical qualification for quite some time. Because, it so happens, I have to "play" normal. I have to wake up five days a week, and go do the same thing. I have to see the same people and do the same work. I need to be the same person every day. I am not. But by identifying and discrediting these alien feelings, I have learned to use the positive aspects of my mental illness to my favor, and I have learned to divorce my identity from those which threaten to destroy it. (Most people with schizophrenia develop it around ages 23-27.)

Yet, in that divorce of identity from experience, something is lost.

Some huge, gorgeous, fascinating framework of me from which all lovely elements exude and flow has been alienated as an unknowable Other. I have decided not to know myself. I have decided, She, with all her terrifying power, is dangerous and I would rather her lost.

But she is me, and I owe her, kind of, everything.

And a human is no more an amalgamation of isolated parts than a cake is just eggs, sugar, and dough. There's something More there. Something which flows in between the parts, is exhibited through them, dwells within them, and is the fount of being where essence lies- and Essence supercedes analysis.

It took me years to learn to live. I had learned to accept my Essence, to delight in her, to use her and play with her joyfully, but I still fear her.

And I had never met anyone who wanted to know her before.

I had never met anyone who wasn't scared.

I had never met anyone who knew me, just knew me, or moreso, knew the nature of who I was like it was just the most natural fact in the world. My consciousness is the most complicated puzzle I have ever found in the world. But whatever it is or was, Jesse knew how to read it.

And he spoke to a part of me which lies underneath my everyday ordinary consciousness. His soul whispered to my soul in some kind of cosmic rustling of awareness and wind which was beyond both our control and comprehension. I do not necessarily think we "chose" to love each other. I think we just did, and our souls recognized each other like they'd met somewhere before, and, as to our separate identities, our souls simply did not care. So we just got to follow suit.

It has been the closest to magic or God I have experienced, being loved this way. In fact, it is both. I thought I had loved before, but that kind of love had always been more of an urge, or an act, whereas this feels like breathing. It does not matter whatever happens, ever again, at all. We are both here in this universe. We found each other very young, and knew each other, from before, and in the other person, we both recognized a universe twice the size of which our single minds could ever independently dream.

And in that universe, my mind is but an organ- not a master. It is a note of a song, not the song itself. It still terrifies- and sometimes its discordant chaos jars the melody of chords. Often, when that happens, it does not sound pretty.

I don't know how to describe that sound.

But to know that someone else can hear it? That they are attuned to whatever I am, and they are capable of perceiving whatever I exude, and they are unafraid to know whatever hell or heaven my world by day might be- and, in fact, they are intent upon unapologetically knowing it-

to be seen, to be heard, and to not be wrong,

feels like waking up in the morning to a bright new beautiful sun.

And time and distance stretch our chords to respectively play us differently, but our relationship is always some kind of otherworldly song, and physical distance just seems like semantics, for the song sings forever throbbing, emanating from my heart, and it is forever with me.

And everything I could want or dream of, everything I might possibly lack, lies already fulfilled, in my heart, here, at this exact time, and at this exact moment.

And naturally I want to feel the touch of your skin, your sweet smell, the warmth of your body, your insights on world events, your commentary on Tetris, your teamwork when we're dumpster diving, your colorful stories and ridiculous laugh, your eyes as you juggle forks and spoons at a restaurant- those things are precious.

They have an elemental quality of Peter Pan magic within which I am both my oldest, greatest self and a youngest, most innocent child who's never known fear of the world. There is, to you, an essence. It transcends space, time, and even mind, and most absolutely occupies most fully a single, most infinite moment.

You walk away, but that stays with me. It lights me up when I sing, when I sleep, when I cry, when I dance, when I work, when I'm scared, when I feel majestic, or when I feel alone.

Within the cavity of my chest exists an incarnation of you, which, once met me, cannot be separate.

We are two elements of the same person. I cannot fear to lose you, for you are in me- you are myself.

And there's no Valentine's card for that.