Peanut Butter Voo Doo

 

The joke about bipolar fell flatter than when Mick Jagger tries to sing...well...anything.
One sonorous death scream and then it lay there twitching on the breakroom table between them. They forgot she was there in the corner.
The temperature receded several degrees as the room deflated when they realized their terminal mistake and started shifting uncomfortably in the bleeding silence, drowning in the knowledge that they can't swim out of this one.
One of them tries to make her tongue a tourniquet, "we're sorry...we didn't...we forgot... you were...that you had...IT," but her tongue wasn't up to the task and the world began to shimmer and hemorrhage, piling iron up like cupcakes frosted with pennies.
When she sets down her half eaten overflowing peanut butter and jelly, it echoes in the cavernous vacuum of anticipation, the reverberation loosens the sweet glue stuck to her teeth.
With an eyebrow raised and butterflies doing ballet in her bladder, she spoke at last. To them, she said:

"Do you really know what having IT is like?" Two vigorously shaking heads like caffeinated bobble heads ride downcast eyes peering into the hole they hoped would open up and swallow them whole.

"To know is to ask am it IT or is IT me?" the smell of regret and self flagellation hovers on the air. Cherry cheeks add a layer of sweetness to the symphony.
"1) I dream in smellovision and 3am smells like marigolds.
2) I'm a voo doo doll living in the splintered reality of a broken mirror.
3) Life, most days feels like winning the raffle at a car wash.
4) I steal used books from church libraries because I love the smell and feel of a good secret.
5) If you split me open like a sunflower husk and peer inside, you'll find circles withing circles, overlapping other circles...but no seed.
6) Saturday and Sunday are the hungriest days of the week. IT's a cornflakes and water loneliness served with stale ramen noodle soup smiles at a tv with no sound.
7) I believe in ghosts. They whisper in my ear when I'm trying to sleep reminding me of that one time 3 months ago I tried tell a joke and no one laughed or that we are always one step away from nuclear war or that Trump could technically be president one more term why do I squirm so much squirming is on the Autism spectrum do I have Autism do I no I don't yes I do maybe I'm just crazy.

Today I'm an uncharacteristically chilly spring morning. Tomorrow could be a rainstorm in a cemetery. It's all up to IT, the voo doo priestess in my head."

It as all a day dream. She'd never say all of those things. She folded in on herself and pretended not to hear, her ears burning with the torture of having something to say and no way to say it.