Anytime someone asks me how I am doing right after a mummy episode, I wonder what to say to them. Is tired of a mood or a disorder? What is scared? Because that’s what I usually feel: clinically, unbearably, maniacally tired.
It’s a part of the routine. I go from doing breathing exercises to crying to thinking about death to sitting in my room listening to Ludovico trying to drown mummy’s voice that is spewing hate and anger. I like to think that this hate scene with a calming Ludovico playing over it makes Stanley Kubrick proud. Then I force her to take medicines. Later, I stay up in bed for a long, too scared to fall asleep, reading half a sad book in one go. In this one, a father hits, burns, and cuts his children while he cries, and while they cry. When I sleep, I dream of being stuck in a polluted sea while my favorite books drown. I am hit by memory in my dream of a time I was in the same sea and it was all beautiful and happy. I keep trying to go back to that time in the dream while trying to pull myself out of sleep. I use coffee. The new, fancy one I got.
And suddenly, over a meal, a chore, a walk, like wind blowing away dark heavy clouds from over our house, mummy is well, smiling, listening to old songs on Carvaan like a child who was gifted a drum-set at her 3rd birthday. I am left empty-handed, my coffee over, the dream waked from, anxiety loose with no cause to hold on to, and Ludovico playing over nothing. The scare of another episode lingers over his piano notes. I will normalcy in those moments by rubbing moisturizer on my skin. It smells of fresh fruits. When people ask me how I am doing, I say tired (clinically, unbearably, maniacally), while looking for fruit-smelling body scrubs. You think Stanley would end my movie like this?