A friend once described my breakdown as high functioning. I still went to work; saw my friends, though not as often, I admit. I dated someone, although in dating him, I succeeded in making everything worse. Perhaps, most importantly, I wrote; a 200,000 word monster. Those words have never left me. Those characters have never left me.

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It started simply enough. It was the summer of 2005, I had graduated from college three months before, had not yet started the job which would eventually drag me down. Hamlet was performing on the Boston Common, and I went to see it, not once or twice, but four times. I began to see things in the underlying edges of the characters, in the subtextual movements on stage. It was a short story first, two actors having not seen one another several years, happened to be in the same town for this performance.

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It grew from there. I expanded the characters. I gave them bits of my history and neuroses; they stopped being just friends at some point, being instead lovers, then in love with one another. I gave them my breakdown. While I was having my breakdown, I was writing these characters at three in the morning. Drinking my continuous spin of tea, I wrote these characters until they lived under my skin, and I could not differentiate where my breakdown ended, and theirs started. When I finally broke it off with the bad-for-me-boyfriend, I broke them up too. I wrote those 200,000 words in just a little over a year. I closed my eyes, and those characters still danced before me. It was perhaps the closest I came to an absolute brink. I forgot briefly how to live.

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When I finally started to pull myself out, when I finally left that job and started graduate school, I would not write that story. I still have it saved on my hard drive, but for almost two years, I would not allow myself to read it. Because if I did, I would go back. I would fall into again that desperateness of emotion, that absolute emptiness I thought I'd never escape.

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It was the end of the 2008 fall semester, nearly a year since I had started to fight, when I wrote my first poem reflecting on that period, when I finally realized the fissures had started to reforge, never entirely whole again, but still practically invisible. Except to those who knew. Except for those who watched me fall, and crawl my way back again.

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Except for those I have since told.

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Perhaps it is right that I'm finally working on that monster again.

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Sauntering [Downward]

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When you murmur between sheets,

and stars, I can hear you.

Your rise and fall of voice and tone,

quiet words,

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soft touches, and kisses.

You admit more in the darkness,

and under cotton –

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(Egyptian high count,

I only would have you

buy the best) –

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but still. I wish you wouldn't

whisper what secrets you keep

just under skin.

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Because when you do, I cannot escape,

and every time you fall,

I do too.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Stefanie Maclin, Guest Blogger

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Stefanie Maclin's poetry and short fiction has appeared in several publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including Under the Radar, The Maynard, Doorknobs&Bodypaint, Astropoetica, Star*Line, The Linnett's Wings, Underground Voices, Battered Suitcase, and Poetica Publishing's Mizmor L'David Anthology: The Shoah. She has guest blogged previously for Poetica Magazine. She has work forthcoming in Illumen, Ashe Journal, and Skive Magazine. She has recently completed her Master's degree in Library Science/Archives Management and is working on what she hopes will be her first full-length chapbook, a work she is tentatively titling Descent. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor