Going home for Anna was like rolling a die, the shiny acrylic clattering on weed-overgrown cobblestones as she walked up the path to her front door. The die rolled as she turned the doorknob, settling on a number as the brass cooled her palm and she breathed in, the mulch smell of the yard invading her senses.
Six black dots, maybe:
“I’m home!” Anna called, slipping out of her sneakers and letting her bag fall to a nearby chair. Footsteps started almost immediately, her mom coming around the corner.
The classic banter of “how was school?” and “it was fine” for a moment, then a bowl of freshly cut fruit, timed just right so it would be ready when Anna walked through the door. A few minutes of chat before she went to her room to do homework, then later, a home cooked meal. Maybe even a movie night.
Number six didn’t happen often.
There was always one, lone dot, though:
Anna stepped through the door and padded toward her room, already knowing today was a bad day for her mother. The lights were off, leaving the living room in front of her dim. The blankets on the couch were askew, and there was a quiet that seemed to creep into her skin.
Her room was just as dark, so she flicked on her lamp and tossed her bag on her bed. It only took her another minute to slide into her softest hoodie and settle at her desk chair, spinning gently side to side as she opened her laptop. The screen was still broadcasting her last class, math equations scrawled across the white background. She exited the page and clicked open her most recent Google Doc, a barely-begun essay for psychology. She was in the home stretch of her senior year of high school, and this project was the last one for this class. The prompt was wide open, allowing students to pick and choose from any of the content they’d covered in the semester.
Her chosen topic was bipolar disorder. The unit on mental disorders had been fascinating, and she could have spent the entire class just learning about that small aspect of psychology. Hence, her final essay allowed her to delve even deeper into all the details and studies done on BD.
With the research she’d done so far, she had nearly filled ten pages of her notebook, and it was far too much to fit into the word count requirements for the essay. With her careful consideration of all she’d read, she’d decided to focus on the actual patients in the studies. Their lives, their experiences, their individuality when it came to the disorder. There were so many differences, big and small, that made up each person’s story.
The cursor on her document blinked up at her, like it was waiting for her to start typing. With a glance at the rough outline she’d made, Anna began typing. It was nothing perfect yet, but the general form of the writing began to slot into place. A paragraph on Margo, a middle-aged mom who’d been diagnosed two years prior. One on Jason, whose case was so severe that he’d ended up permanently in a psych ward. Two paragraphs for general information and explanation, and a conclusion to tie everything up into a tidy bow.
Sitting back, she wondered if this would mean as much to anyone else as it meant to her. After all, this information wasn’t just for a simple school class, or even the personal interest she liked to make her excuse for why she thought so much about it. It was the way she connected to one of the people closest to her, it was how she learned so that she could understand more and be more helpful. It was her life.
The very first study she’d experienced was her own mother, when she was ten years old. Her father sitting her down on the edge of her bed at nearly midnight, the way his voice was so soft that it almost seemed like nothing was wrong. The creaking of the bed frame beneath them as he settled next to her, sighing.
“Mom is going through a hard time, right now,” he’d said, unsure how to break the news of the diagnosis to a child. She wouldn’t fully understand until later, he knew, but this was delicate. It was his first time raising a child and his first time finding out his wife had bipolar disorder.
It made sense, to be fair. It hadn’t been a surprise of any sort to anyone except Anna, and even that was simply because she was so young.
Her father was right, as well. The older she got, the more she understood, the more everything made sense. It was just normal life, now, after seven years of living with the information. All this had really led up to her registering for Psych 101 this year.
Anna’s fingers refocused on the keyboard, and she typed the last sentence:“Everyone gets a different battle, and sometimes other people get it a little harder, but you just have to meet them where they are.”It summed up exactly what she felt, how she had learned to be around her mom from childhood, even though she hadn’t known of her disorder until later. How she felt infinitely closer to her mom after reading so much about how she must experience BD. How two weeks of research and time had strengthened a bond she hoped would never break.
