It’s Our Lucky Day
By: Michelle Cristiani
It’s your lucky day because you have questions - more than just that one - and I have answers to all of them, especially that one.
I worked hard to make you into me. You’ll like me, promise.
I’ll start with some unsolicited advice.
If you put your vintage Barbie doll collection in grandma’s basement, it will be stolen.
Mom will become a cat person around age 60. Start teasing her about this now.
Stop trying to get Vaughn to admit to loving you: he never will. Note that I didn’t say he’ll never love you.
Save. Your. Concert. T-shirts. Trust me on this one.
Your most pressing question has a long and a short answer.
The short answer is no. You’re not broken. There’s a name for it, but it’s not the same name anymore, so it won’t mean anything to you. You’ll give it a fake name anyway, when you’re first diagnosed in a couple decades. Because if you say, I have Bipolar Disorder, no one will believe you. You don’t believe me even now. But you already know what it feels like, don’t you? Of course you do. Let me remember with you.
There we were, curled up in the waiting room next to our depressed Great Uncle. I was in the body that squirmed when you recognized what that looked like because you knew what that felt like. And, too, the lightning-like terror when we heard he was gone from the earth, and how he chose to leave it. The fear that would be us, someday. The morbid connection to a broken man we could practically smell, a member of the same clan.
There we were, on the phone with a friend deep in a manic episode. How she explained she had to leave home every February, how there was no punctuation within or between her sentences. I was in the body that trembled when you hung up. I remember, too, when everyone else grew out of adolescent infatuation, but you didn’t. Because the concept of fixation was nothing more, back then, than a reason for people to tell you to grow up. I remember compulsion and addiction and violent tears in front of stereos. Talking too loudly for a quiet world, and gesturing too widely for the libraries we live in. Looking around as hydrogen and oxygen neatly make water for everyone else; but there’s a bomb inside of us, and they must see it glowing, they must see it, right?
Nobody sees it.
We can look back together. But you’ll have to live through a little more pain to get to me. I’ll hold your hand through it.
I am with you, when everyone else stops dancing but you are still on fire. When you’re up all night and you’re so creative, and how do you do it? That’s what they’ll ask, when it doesn’t inconvenience them. When everyone is worn out but you, and you’re mad at them for it. You and I, buzzed and lonely, when the audience we crave is already fast asleep.
You’ll call them “glamour fits” for years - years - before you acknowledge a pattern: that they happen at the same times around the same time every year, sometimes to the very day; that it doesn’t matter where in the world you live or who you live with, or how many bubble baths you take or how much yoga you twist into. That they’re followed by crashes so severe you can’t stand up and wash the dishes. That you can map them like a heartbeat, up and down, and up and up, and down, so very, very far down.
When our contemporaries announce they’ve grown out of partying and settle down in an age-appropriate way. When, in circles of propriety and parenthood, we’re barely even able to whisper “postpartum” - and after that we perform health, us, paragons of sobriety.
I’ll be with you when we hide the hackneyed highs and lows: from our partners and children and families and communities and then - when we become fluent - ourselves. When we are close to convulsing from the natural disasters inside us even as we turn the picture book pages slowly. On the worst days, we’re Sisyphus trudging and Daedelus soaring at the same time (there’s a name for that too). On the day we submerge the deepest - a sunny one that to us is gray sewage - we’ll be at the park, pushing the swings. We will push the swings up and down and up and down, a physical trail of where our brains leave us. And while we push, the extra bank card burns in our pockets, begging us to leave town with it and nothing else. We don’t even have to talk about the shame. I already know it because of course I carry it, too.
I already know you are lucky to be alive. Lucky not to be in prison, or forever rehab. I already know that the lines between you and those tragedies are so fine that even your manic eagle eyes can’t see the blur. I know what you did; but I also know what you escaped. I’m here to tell you words that would be empty coming from anyone else but me: it will get easier.
And - did I say this already? You’re not broken. At first you won’t believe it: when you saunter towards the doctor saying, you’ve never seen the likes of me. They’ll know why you can’t stop shivering. And within hours they’ll connect your dots into such a sparkling constellation they might as well have mapped the sky. That’s what this is called? This suffering has a name? Isn’t that what crazy people are called? Am I crazy? Does it matter, when the carrot of healing is dangled, teasing what we didn’t know was possible?
The first month, you’ll swallow the medication thinking “poison.” You won’t believe in balance. And you don’t know if you want to. The second month, you’ll swallow the medication thinking “placebo.” You’ll start to admit you want balance. And are afraid to believe you can find it. The third month, you’ll swallow the medication thinking “panacea.” Someday, you’ll find it. Someday, you’ll fly but not too high. Dance in libraries but not because you can’t help it. Speed without speed. Float to the ground, instead of crashing.
By the time you’re me, the people who love you will notice the glow when the bomb starts cooking. They’ll say - not, “What’s wrong with you?”- but instead, “What are you feeling?” They certainly won’t turn away disgusted - or worse, turn away without noticing at all.
In turn, you’ll get to tell others they aren’t broken, either. You’ll get to say, if you are broken, then I’m broken too, and here is where I found my glue. We found each other. What a lucky day, for both of you.
You’ll live where all manner of people throw around hyperfixations like they’re gifts. You’ll laugh about the laser-sharp focus only your brains can alchemize; you’ll treasure friends who know you before they meet you. Whether you fixate on Tudor history or condor migration or ninja shadow patterns, someone somewhere will want to hear about it - or even know as much or more than you. Your fixation will be their lucky day.
You know, I owe it to you. You held on tight and took the leap. You worked very, very hard to get to be me. That flavor of high, the terrifying one: you and I both know that’s not joy. But we will know pure joy. It’s built in, organic to this job well done.
This day is lucky for me, too. I get to take a rest from the climb and celebrate how much you’re going to love the view from up here. Keep me close, and know that I have seen the worst, and I’m sitting here still, honoring you. Let’s hold hands, and hands and see who will meet us at the next corner. I hope she’s proud of us. I hope it’s her lucky day, too.
Michelle Cristiani teaches reading and writing at Portland Community College in Portland OR. She won the Margarita Donnelly Prose Prize from Calyx Press in 2018 for her memoir of stroke recovery at age 42. She has another memoir excerpt in Inverted Syntax, which was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her poem "Io" was published in Tangled Locks' MoonBites art+poetry project and was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize. She has a recent flash fiction in On The Run, recent erotica in the anthology Crowded House by Cleis Press, and horror-erotica in the anthology Devilish Deals by Thurston Howl Publications. In 2021, Cristiani was published in SadGirlsClub and Apple in the Dark. She is a member of #ownvoices due to disabilities sustained after her stroke. You can find her at heart-pages.com and on twitter. X