Synapses

I’ll start by saying that this year, I’ve written more than I’ve ever written. I’ll start by saying that this year, I’ve experienced more than I’ve experienced in a long time. It is purely coincidence that the two were together. But a great coincidence. A therapeutic coincidence.

It began with me putting some stories and poems into a Dropbox. It began with my name on a flimsy, white piece of paper on a bulletin board. Which, despite how flimsy a piece of paper is, always feels good to see. When you know you’ve made it.

I didn’t know the list of 11 other names on that piece of paper would come to be a fascinating, necessary group of people in my life. I didn’t know they would help me understand the breaking of the brain. But, I’ll get to them. What one always needs in the beginning, unsurprisingly, is themselves.

September, 2014. That’s when it really started. The writing. The breaking. It began with paper, and paper started it again. It broke all the time, usually around 2:30 am after promising myself to sleep, after promising myself to no longer pick up the glaring white screen that is my iPhone - the glaring white screen that imminently further prolongs my sleep. I always pick it up anyways. The process is a quick and slow motion simultaneously - the gritting of teeth to prevent myself from reaching over, from grabbing and clicking the circular button and putting in my passcode and being rewarded with the Notes app. Blank, yellow lines: a canvas for a writer. The quick part comes when I write what I had in my head with my fingers. This is sometimes hard and sometimes very easy. The slow part is weaving it all together to make sense. This used to be impossible. It is not now. Like I said, I’ll get to that. All these thoughts, these rhythms, these sentiments come pouring into my head at night as if they have been brewing all day - like my brain has been waiting for the perfect moment of silence to perform and spew out what it has been deliberating.

I imagine it like a cracking of the skull. A breaking open of the top of my head, like one of those Kinder surprise eggs: cracking perfectly in the middle and opening, but still hanging onto the rest of the skull so it can re-attach itself when the sun has risen. When it is open, it allows colours and motion and words to flow freely. Like when my skull is closed during the day, it is trapped. It has been waiting for these calm hours of the night, patiently. Pop pop pop. In the night. Those are my words - bursting out like bubbles and popping on the page, exploding into things with meaning. Once these thought bubbles have been blown and popped – my mind is free. I can sleep. I am completely alone. When they are not bubbles, they are gunshots - firing out with a speed I didn't know my brain capable of. Sometimes they are bloody wounds to look at the next day on this canvas. Wounds I didn't mean to open and re-open and open and re-open. Pop pop pop. It is magic, at least to me. It is a rabbit out of the hat. I am here, my words are here, and everyone else is somewhere out there. When I write enough, when the bubbles have popped and the gunshots have been fired and I alone can see the rabbit reveal himself out of somewhere, somewhere I can't place - it is a portrait of the things that make me. It is me. It is a form of self-discovery, of wanting to know more because I was never told. No one else has fired such a sure gun my way, and made me know. No one has torn me, bloodied me with the shrapnel of who I am. And so I tear myself. And I write.

But I am, or was, always completely alone.

This is where the 11 others come in. They helped me tweeze out the shrapnel and re-arrange the bloody pieces so I could understand. I didn’t know writing involved so much tearing, so much breaking. I also didn’t know that there were people out there, a workshop group who I would eventually be shoved together with, that could help my brain.

I hadn’t known, before September 2014 and slightly after the solitude was necessary to write and give them what they needed to help, that they could shut my brain in the night when it is spinning uncontrollably. Shut off the mess. Shove the rabbit back in when the show is over.

That old saying – the tired one: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” They never talk about who gives you the pen. They never talk about who takes it away on the days you don’t need it but thought you did.

Did it take sleeping in a bed with two of them, out of the 11, to realize that? I think it did.

Out of these two, there is one who is logical, always. She always has a good suggestion for your work and, from the confident way she speaks, you know it is a good suggestion. She has glasses and a staggering walk. There is one who I can only describe as being a fairy of sorts. She believes in auras and the power of kale smoothies. Her voice is high like a child’s, but she swears. And everyone laughs with her.

There are some people you can live with for your entire university career and never really know them or have them know you. There are some people you can sit at a long, green table with every Tuesday for two hours for a couple of months, and know things about them that you’re unsure their mother knows.

I believe now, that while I have learned about quackery and while I am wholly an atheist, that there is something this year between the 12 of us. That there was something, sleeping in the same bed that night, between the three of us.

The one with the child voice was in the middle, and held our hands in hers. She asked if we could feel her aura. And while I didn’t and don’t believe aura is the right word for it, I know that I felt and understood her.

Something about the three of us, these strangers up until the long, green table a couple of months ago, was together that night. I was not completely alone. Something about us understood.

Electricity is all the brain is. Connection after connection after connection. One can’t exist without the other. When one synapse stops flowing, the other does too.

This scares me.

Will my voice continue on in the dark without them to capture the sounds?

I feel like the one who believes in auras would say that a connection starts somewhere, anywhere. It started with our 12 names on that piece of paper. She continued it in my hands that night, and I will carry it with me. Holding her electricity in my brain and in my hands and heart to connect it with someone or something else. Maybe to return to her. I’m not sure.

When something breaks, is something stronger built in its place?

I do know that it became a Homo sapiens brain because it was once something else. Something extreme happened. That extreme eventually disappeared but it would and will always be a part of the brain. It adapted to what was left and it was better.

I think the logical one would say I am getting to somewhere else.