Chapter Two: Patricia, the Hypomanic Sleep Eater
Standing next to her 2002 Mazda MPV—metallic green—minivan, Patricia glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw her reflection; it seemed to undergo a nightmarish metamorphosis with the sideways sleet smacking her in the face and the gasoline throbbing through the hose and into her car.
Machinery on the other side of the planet pumped the light sweet crude from the Saudi earth and vomited all 42-million gallons of it, including Patricia’s quarter barrel’s worth, into a tanker in the oil port of Yanbu, where it started its 40-day and 40-night, 7,500-mile journey toward a Louisiana offshore oil port, 20 miles southeast of Port Fourchon. Marathon Ashland extracted it all much like punching a hole in a paint can, to Patricia, and pouring it through an underwater pipeline to the shore. Sustained by rhythmic repetition, every ounce pulsed toward a hub in Patoka, Illinois, and routed to a refinery 92 miles away in Robinson. Processed to its $1.75 a gallon value, the liquid’s new form travelled to a Louisville, Kentucky, terminal and onward to local gas pumps.
Feeling every piece of the sleet pound her flesh harder, harder, and harder, Patricia awoke with an eruption of haphazard energy and thought, There’s no way I’m going to my cousin’s birthday party in Louisville, followed by, I gotta get me a Music City Star train pass.
* * *
Sitting up in bed, she looked to her left at the wooden nightstand, the one that she’d used as a child in this same house. Her digital clock blinked, 2:30. The device rested atop way too many books. At least half were unread, awaiting their turn in Patricia’s to do queue: astrology, knitting, tarot. Blank journals, too. Next to this leaning tower, a silver jewelry box included a small plastic tiara that she wore when feeling blue, which was way too many nights this month. An air purifier and red candle took up the rest of the real estate.
First, she saw draped over part of the nightstand the plastic that was once wrapped around the leftovers of home delivery pizza. Then, she smelled the pizza, or what it had become throughout the night. Half digested, the mess was all over her red and white plaid pajamas, her covers—including a blanket her mother made from many of her old childhood t-shirts, and the bedsheets. The concoction blended in an entire bag of microwaveable popcorn, movie theater butter flavor, and some chocolate-covered raisins.
“What a disaster,” she said to no one in the room, and she pulled everything from the bed to the floor, exposing the mattresses.
She stripped down to her underpants as she headed out of her room and across the hall to the guest bath, which she had seized and declared under quarantine once she decided to stay home for another year and commute into Nashville due to the city’s always-outrageous apartment rental fees. Patricia believed that paying her parents a reasonable monthly rent outweighed the few rules—chores and whatnot—that they still required.
Inside with the door eased shut, she saw a multicolored collection of panties, bras, and socks covering the floor from end to end. The physicality of how she navigated across the minefield-inspired room was a graceful relationship between her subconscious and her muscles—like a dancer. Reaching the shower curtain, she raised her left arm and grabbed an oversized t-shirt with a Hard Rock Café London logo across the front. Inserting her head and arms, she covered her nakedness and stood in front of the toilet.
At some point in the process of making it to the restroom, she had flipped the lid up. Seeing her reflection in a mirror, she wore an expression of a woman seldom at peace, as if she were a kaleidoscope that had been inadequately rattled…vibrating. She lowered her head and began to drip and spatter her inner pigments, not quite reaching their destination, into which she embedded small pieces of an argument that she had with her mother earlier in the week.
Event over and mouth wiped with the London-portion of the logo, she noticed scattered all around and in her sink her potions and related-paraphernalia: medical scissors, multivitamins and fish oil, codeine-enriched cough syrup, lotions galore, facial soap and daily moisturizers, gel tabs, Vicodin left over from a sinus infection, Prozac, Lexapro, and Klonopin, all hid amid thickly interwoven skins of sticky post-it notes, cotton products of all sorts, and empty hygiene containers.
“I tend to hold on to old prescriptions,” she remembered saying to Jacob in his backyard, not far from his dying tree.
Walking back to her bedroom, she noticed an in-progress letter stuffed inside one of the books on her nightstand. She removed the pages and fell on the exposed mattresses, reading.
“Greetings Knucklehead.” She started Jacob’s letter, continuing: “I’ve been eating in my sleep, lately. Sleep-eating. No shit. It’s rumored to be a side effect of one of the medications I’m on. I wake up in the morning, and there’s all these little tell-tale signs that I’ve been munching in the middle of the night! I kinda remember it in a dreamlike way, but not when I’m doing it.”
She stopped reading long enough to pull a blanket off the floor on the clean side of her bed, engulfing herself within the fabric and returning to the letter.
“I’ve been learning all I can about bipolar disorder, hypomania, triggers…meds. Being hypomanic is such a rush. The racing thoughts (feeling like you’re ‘on’ your game), the extra energy. Everyone moves slow compared to you. I get so much done. I leap out of bed. I need less sleep. But less sleep makes me irritable. I put up all the Christmas decorations in like an hour and a half. I can’t settle down. It’s annoying. I wish I could stop myself. It’s uncontrollable. I wish I weren’t so…I don’t know. I’m exhausted. I hate that about this disorder.”
Somehow, from somewhere, she located a pack of cigarettes and a lighter—the source of her fight with said mother.
Again to the page: “Ah, yes, the medication. My counselor says there will come a day when I can take much lower doses, but that day isn’t here yet. The anti-anxiety medication is working wonders. Thoughts start going too fast, and I feel out of control, which causes the anxiety to set in. All this holiday food got me thinking about dropping some pounds, so I experimented with my meds a bit last week. Not good. I was up puking half the night on Wednesday.”
Patricia paused for a moment, inhaled, exhaled, and blinked. Thinking about the threatening commute into Nashville and the unstoppable workday, her gaze drifted downward and toward the letter, which now seemed more like a helter-skelter scribble-scrabble of excuses. She was unaware that she held the pages in her hands and had formed ever-tightening fists. She opened her hands and—at first—began to caress the composition.
Then, she did it.
At first, she attacked them with the air of a sleepwalker, but then she pounced upon her text, much like a sorceress. She ripped at the words, tore the pages, and spit on the fragments.
And moments before she drifted off to sleep upon the naked mattress—mess before her, she travelled through thoughts of Jacob, Vinod, and the coming day’s obligations.
###
Copyright © 2023 by Roy Lee Burkhead, II
