The Break

A friend had a severe chemical imbalance that resulted in a psychotic break and ended in schizophrenia. The internet, counseling and time have given me the information I need to properly understand and process what happened not only to my friend, but to me as well. At that time there was no internet and I had no idea what was happening, I naively thought I could help or fix what was wrong and guide this person through hard times and back to ‘normalcy’. It ended with her being hog-tied by her parents, literally bound hands-to-feet in front of me, then driven across 2 states back home. I have no clear account of how many months this all lasted, I certainly became delusional myself and had no idea how to reach out, or who to ask for help. My memories of those months are very gauzy; ripped apart and spread out like messy clumps of cotton pulled across perfectly manicured hedges in the ‘burbs around Halloween. 

Her decent into total dislocation from reality turned out to have classic symptoms, naked walks in public, auditory and visual hallucinations, divestment of all material possessions and intense bouts of paranoia. There were possibly hundreds of hours she stood in the hallway at my place, a 5 bedroom San Francisco flat I shared with several friends, in an apparent somnambulant state; unresponsive, unaware of her surroundings and unable to make any contact. Convinced she was in a state of ‘hibernation’ I kept trying to get through, leading her by the hand to vistas and landmarks we both knew and loved, putting items in her hands that might get a response or playing music I knew was meaningful. Having no idea what it was that was happening to her mind I chose to believe that her actions and attitude were self-imposed, something that needed to be worked through before coming out the other side in a hopefully better place. The Park Rangers brought her to my house a half dozen times after finding her walking naked through the groves near the ocean, she would disappear while I was at work. She emptied out her bank account and gave thousands of saved dollars to homeless on the street, boxed up her cassettes and records and gave them to a garbage collector she had become friendly with before the break. Lost her apartment, her job and all context that separated what was happening inside her head from outside.

The beaten cotton clumps of memory I have since recovered lead me to believe that I tried and maybe succeeded in helping her kick her drug habit, she chose needles as the weapon of delivery and anything she could cook as the poison, and one of the few memories I have never lost was standing near the Golden Gate bridge and watching her throw her works over a cliff; sharps bent and melted, all tied up in the rubber strap usually found cinched to her bicep or calf.

On some of the excursions we went on I would fantasize that friends past or present would randomly appear and provide me with guidance, saving me with some way out of the trap I was deeply immersed in and pulling me out of the weeks and weeks of despair I was in over the situation. On one occasion I remember feeling sure I saw an old friend from high school as we were walking the beach at Aquatic Park, I waved and moved to get a closer look but my addled friend took that same moment to break for the ocean. I lost sight of this person in the crowd near the concrete seats as I wrestled my ward to the sand and kept her from plunging into the surf. I was so certain that this person had seen and recognized me too and that experience is also one I never lost, it somehow gave me hope that ‘normal’ life still existed outside of my darkness. 

Perhaps I became a lighthouse for imbalanced minds at that time because not long after this episode ended another similar one began, a young woman that slid into delusion naming me her savior, her jesus and although more responsive and lucid than the first her grasp of reality had become fragmented and without rational context. I was not as kind in this case and my emotional faculties completely shut down, I have no tenable memories of this time and emotionally was more hollow than the discarded snake skin. I learned from brief and painful conversations later that she was also collected by her family and shipped back to where she came from. Pieces of information that floated my way about these 2 women would occasionally reach me in the following years, and perhaps my friends understood how much these conversations would crush my spirit because often the tone of the telling was delivered in overly positive spin. More than a decade later I am not quite willing to recover most of what I experienced and rather would let those years from the late 90’s remain buried in purposeful psychic landfill, a thick layer of protective mental concrete smoothing it all out to a monochrome strata.

 Not surprisingly all the relationships I had dissolved, not that I was very good at maintaining those under the best circumstances anyway; the flat I shared with my friends was abandoned, the projects I was part of crumbled and if it hadn’t been for one of my former flat mates generosity and kindness I would have undoubtedly ended up on the street or worse. I started working 2 jobs, somewhere around 16 hours a day doing daily double shifts. I lost 40 pounds and instead of sleeping found myself lying in bed with endless streams running from the corners of my eyes and into my ears. I remember the feeling of being unnerved by the tears in part because there was no recognizable or predictable emotion to accompany them, but also because I knew I should be feeling something and most of all I should be exhausted and asleep.

I packed up the all my memories, literally, into boxes. Everything I had ever grown fond of from middle school into my 20’s went into tightly packed cardboard cubes, pictures, journals, mementos and emotions. I put them all in my pickup truck and drove them to Canada, leaving them with my Mom for 16 years.