Bipolar disorder is a gift sometimes. Depression is what I struggle with mostly, but sometimes an overwhelming feeling of passion overcomes me. If I’m lucky, the result is something written or drawn worth of holding onto. Today I drove down the road with my chest ablaze. I turned the music up loud to block out the noise, and I held onto my shirt to keep my heart from bursting through.

When this disorder was new to me, my fear of the impending despair that would soon follow the flames would snuff them out. I eventually learned to hold onto the passion as long as it allowed itself to manifest, and I learned to make the most of the good moments and especially the great ones. I’ve been told that I inspire passion in other people in a variety of ways, but its not me doing the inspiring. I am at the mercy of this illness that only a handful of people know I fight.

Writing helps, but when the words don’t come, my fingers itch for a different kind of keys. My insides resonate with piano chords in a way that writing can’t. I don’t hear the music, I become it. I’ve mentioned this to other musicians, and they say they feel the same. I don’t have a piano anymore, and I fear this flame will burn clean through me without one. Today, I am settling for the keys connected to this screen, but the screen remains lifeless. I envy writers who have a greater gift for wordcraft. What power they have over people like me and, if they are anything like me, over themselves. I haven’t felt that power in a long time, but I hear it knocking. Knocking, knocking, this incessant phantom knocks. Tapping at my chamber door, it is.

. . . . . .

Back in 2006-ish, I wrote the beginning of a book. A chapter. I can never seem to write more than a chapter of anything I write. Not true, but the words are crap after one chapter, so I generally refrain from writing beyond an introduction. I can write a hell of an intro and a pretty good ending, but all the stuff in between lacks the same passion as the punch I put into each end of the middle.

So back in 2006-ish, I started writing. I had a playlist that I listened to obsessively as I spent weeks refining this one thing. The songs were stored on an iPod that has since disappeared, just as that one chapter and any further desire to write did. A few years later, I watched a snippet of Blood Diamond, enough to make me turn the movie off, and I plunged back into writing. The movie scene woke up a deeply-rooted part of me that I had forgotten or maybe didn’t know was there. I hadn’t realized how deeply Africa affected me. Little girl me absorbed, potently, people and places in that land, and they’ve lived in me ever since.

Everything I’ve written comes from that part of me. That’s where the words are buried.

I had a surge of well-being overtake me on Friday. That was God. He does that, you know.

My oldest daughter’s family moved into a new home this weekend, and my husband and I went to Dallas to help out. Going from a small house to a large one makes for easy unpacking, but nothing is easy when you have a baby. My family moved 13 times while we raised our kids. I made that number up, but it’s not a far from the truth. Seems we were always living out of boxes. Not until we moved into the house we are in now did I even unpack all the boxes that I sealed in 2005. The time capsules travelled with us. A clock inside them had stopped like a timeline with a dead end. The last 20 years have been an offshoot of the life we left behind in Austin, and we’ve left crumbs all over San Antonio and Houston and even Dallas a little since the departure. Austin isn’t where we started, but it’s where our kids did, sort of. So Austin kinda feels like home. But not really. Dallas is where I’m from and is the place I always carry with me. Now my daughter is there, so a part of me has returned home. She’s a Dallas-ite by default, and it suits her. My brother deserted Dallas for Fort Worth eons ago, and that place suits him. A bit of Austin, that place is. Stuck between two worlds, that place is, like my brother. My kids aren’t really from anywhere because they are from everywhere, but DNA has a sneaky way of pointing us to our roots.

I’ll never live in Dallas. You can never go home again, a guy said once. The house I grew up in belongs to strangers now.

We’ve been in this house for nearly seven years. I unpacked all my boxes not that long ago, finally, to find a treasure of little girl things and forgotten memories. But I still haven’t put up pictures. I haven’t reached a sense of permanence just yet.

It feels good to be back in my own bed tonight with my own pillows and my cat at the foot of my bed stalking my feet. The cat that travelled with us since Austin is a few feet underground outside my window, so I guess this home is more permanent than I’ve really thought it to be. A part of us will remain in the soil when we leave. And we will leave. It’s weird to think we won’t. A yurt wouldn’t be out of the question for us. But this isn’t Mongolia.