Nineteenth Year Crack Up

This is a poem I wrote during graduate school for Writing. It is a fictionalized account based on what I went through in college.

Twelve years have passed since my days in Boston

Days when I sat under archways thinking,

scribbling poetry, howling sins;
the moon listened

by fracturing the sky.

I read Shakespeare, Kafka, Plath, Poe, and Woolf.

Experiencing their peaks and valleys,

in unfinished homework, lost loves,

the pressures
 building insanity in my own mind,

caused by my genetics unraveling.

There were the weeks spent without a winks sleep,

the lost time (I still cannot remember).

I would pick fights randomly. Then, it begun.

My words raced spoke miles for every minute,

(I had conspiracy theories that the 
other girls

were plotting to give my name 
to the F.B.I.

There was the Camera who only I 
heard talking.

There was anonymous sex 
in a phone booth,

the 2 o’clock phone calls, 
the midnight rollarblade races

around 
campus by myself, shopping sprees

where I 
bought things—such as One Hundred dollars in 
journals from Borders

—all things I later 
gave away, and oh the angry emails.

There came the waking dreams, 
the crying for days on end in my dorm.

The words: I hate myself and want to die

written in a cheap scrawl in my journal.

And, at my worst, the caving walls began.

My friends feared. The tears came and came and came.

They would not stop the day I decided
to die,

to slowly Out, Out of my life.

There was the note, then the pills, then the booze.

Then, there was the trip to the big, big place 
on the hill

where writers have been before,
 a place of labels and electroshocks.

The doctors fed me Prozac and Zoloft

though I asked for a Long Island Iced Tea.

The pills made my wings take flight and objects

appear out of nowhere, in which the nurses

threatening me with leather restraints.

The doctors switched me to Lithium

calming me in days.
 And, I curled in a ball and slept,

dreaming
 about what I would tell the others at school.