Here’s what I roughed out late last night for Wednesday’s upcoming memoirs class. It’s about one particular moment, and a few side details, of a trip to England and France from when I was 16.
It wasn’t altogether a bad experience? Bits and pieces stand out as positive. At that point, I hadn’t yet been diagnosed, but I was definitely manic at times. And very confused about what was going on with my mind.
By the time I got back, all that had ebbed, and it was just a mild depression. So I STILL didn’t get the right diagnosis, until I was single-parenting in my mid-twenties.
Even now, there’s a hint of a question mark between two similar diagnoses, both bipolar flavored.
I may have said something about this trip on here before, because I have a vague memory of posting an image of the London Underground, somewhere. And I don’t know why else I would have done that? Well, it’s an interesting story. I hope it’s not too repetitious.
Either way, I am fairly certain there are details here I didn’t include elsewhere.
The model’s angel wings were somewhere in between the lengths of the two photos I included here, and the backdrop would have been urban. So, some imagination required.
There were other moments to the trip that also had a spiritual vibe, like visiting Stonehenge, etc. And I swore I felt the spirit of my grandmother amidst an old inn in the English countryside. Someone older, as I was falling asleep. I recall asking silently if I could sleep for just one night in the realm of the dead, to really recharge (weird, yes). Everyone else complained of odd noises in the night that kept them awake, but I slept better in that inn than anywhere else, the whole trip. I woke up pretty refreshed.
WITHOUT FURTHER ADO:
Elizabethan Angel Wings
Overcast days make for better outdoor photography—more diffuse lighting. A clouded London afternoon. I pressed my hot cheek against the cool glass of the bus’s window and watched the urban scenery roll by.
The bridge looked ancient. Richmond Bridge across the Thames? Perhaps. The internet claims that’s the oldest bridge in London. I know we saw the oldest door in all of England. I remember the stonework possessing a hue like aged paper, yellowed.
A photoshoot in progress caught my attention, as we halted in the middle of the bridge, caught in traffic. The model, blonde and stunning, adorned in large, feathered angel wings, white and downy.
The artists, scarcely older than myself, students, I thought, caught my enthusiastic expression and fixed gaze. They gestured frantically for me to get off the bus. Would my box-dye, blue-black hair have provided an ideal counterpoint to the model’s honey-gold?
But I was traveling with my English teacher, and a busload of teens with whom I went to high school, back in Schaumburg, Illinois. We weren’t set loose upon the city until after we reached our hotel.
By that point, I was entirely too terrified to try venturing out on my own. I subsisted on sections of a milk chocolate Terry’s Chocolate Orange, rather than finding a restaurant for dinner.
Sadly, this reticence also meant I later missed my shot at visiting Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. Alas. I have a photograph of Morrison’s grave, discovered between the pages of a college journal. No memory of how I acquired it.
Elements combined within my as-yet-undiagnosed bipolar imagination, as I teetered on the brink of a full-blown manic episode: the bridge’s geographic location, British history, and the identity of my girl-crush, her hair the same shade as the model’s. “Elizabethan Angel Wings,” I thought. Almost as good as having Liz with me.
Liz, short for Elizabeth, named after the Equal Rights Amendment, her initials spelling out ERA. Hippie parents.
I had my first panic attack in the car, hyperventilating, explaining to my mother I could no longer manage the trip, but didn’t tell her why. Liz’s parents vetoed the vacation last minute. I knew without friends to fall back on, it would not be a good experience.
No refunds. They forced me to go.
Isolated moments, like the angel, the Australian bracelet-seller in the London Underground, with retinal tears that turned his pupils hypnotically fluid, made the experience worthwhile.
I later learned my teacher wanted to institutionalize me in Europe rather than continue babysitting me. What was causing my tweaked experience? Staring at flowers in city landscaping, I tested myself. Bloody reds and velvet violets saturated as wet paint, led me to question: had I been dosed with a hallucinogen?
I photographed graffiti at sharp diagonals, penned poems in lieu of letters on the backs of postcards. “Knights of nines and nights of knives. So many nights I’ve lived, but only in my head.”
All the Bright and Sparkly Things 
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