When my psychiatrist tries to explain my bipolar disorder to me — Kate Choi

The graph doesn’t get it. The sine function
waving like a white flag, the clean curves
of the concave, the current electric cold.
Two ice caps cut and crystallized. The lines
speak another language, curled with disdain:
psych-talk, Greek thrown around hasty as my hands
shuddering around a keyboard at 3AM.

Me, I’m a handful of pills and a shiver at midnight.
Me, I’m a slut for attention on my arms,
a victim of late-stage capitalism, a good Christian
who lost her way. An addict and an error
and never going to make it past twenty-seven.
I’m conforming, I’m shrinking, but I still want to be
everything they tell me I am, embraced
with wide arms and an open mouth.

There are the breathy instructions: breathe wide
open your eyes slowly or is it breathe slow
open your eyes wide—from the meditation app,
the medication trap, the new-world psychotherapist crap—
Everything defined by a prefix of too-much or not-enough:
hypomanic, hypersomnia, hypothymia.

The graph doesn’t get it. Blank and corporate,
it’s the mechanical curve of an undefined limit.
Top to bottom dissected into borderlines, roadkill
split open at the side of the road. Watch it rot.
The car passes by and you meet my eye,
glistening raw and red in the meaty sunlight.
They tell me: it goeth before the fall. I laugh
and I say try and stop me.

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Kate Choi is a high school junior currently living in Seoul, South Korea. She writes fiction and poetry, and is currently attending Asia Pacific International School. Her publications include Paper Cranes Literary, The Amazine, and Young Writers Journal.