The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong
in my body & in my mind, so they gave me lithium.
They thought I could be bipolar. Possibly schizophrenic.
I was 25 & afraid all the time.
The diagnosis made it hard to breathe.
My boyfriend gave me a book by a philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti
& went to play Frisbee.
I didn't blame him. What could he do?
I seemed to need something other people didn't need
in order to live. It amazed me how people could live.
Life felt flat as a postcard in a rusty rack in an abandoned bus station.
Swimming was the only relief besides crying.
I brought the lithium to the beach
& was about to take a pill
but dropped the bottle in a garbage can instead.
Not even the gulls were interested.
I made a deal: If I still felt this way in five years, I would kill myself.
Five years seemed short enough that I could bear it
& maybe long enough to heal.
Slowly, I got better.
I read the book by Krishnamurti.
He said loneliness is just loneliness. Something like that.
Once you go all the way through it, you're on the other side.
Something like that. I read the chapter over & over.
Went to hear him give a talk in an orange grove in Ojai.
His voice was a beautiful body swimming
all the way to where there is no side.
I moved north. Stood in the small yard one morning
& looked at the flowers without being scared.
The yard was half in sunlight, half in shadow.
I wasn't thinking metaphor. Only how precise it was.
I kneeled in the patchy grass.