the perpetual now

The place where hyperactive meets hypomanic is built on forward, forward, forward. You are a live stream with no pause and definitely no rewind. Your last five minutes become a mystery to you, and so you retrace your steps to pick up from where your mind left off, which is okay because retracing is forward. Take notes. Take more notes.

Once you realise you’ve stopped eating through the day, it’s easy to make a routine of it. A handful of nuts and a multivitamin in the morning to take the edge off; mid-afternoon, a bite of fruit; a light meal in the evening, prepared with care and eaten quickly. For the hours in between, fluids and caffeine suffice.

You are superconnected and yet disconnected, an observer of your apparent connectedness. Conversations become easy: you can be loquacious to the point of recklessness. You perceive time and distance with precision, and yet you keep dropping things and knocking them over. Your body is all wires.

The capabilities that are always deadened by the lows show up together, crowd the brain room, fight among themselves to be heard. You are spoilt for choice. Or so it seems, at least, for now.

The longer it goes on, the more you think about the crash to come. The longer it goes on, the more you think about how deep the crash will be. Because the crash will come, equal and opposite, and it will come because the crash is eventually all you think about.

But before it comes: forward.