Everyday I fall through hands like particles. I fall. I fall. I’m sand. Particles of sand. Aggravated and mad. Filling up like helium in a balloon. I, Taishen only moved to China from the Midwest at the age of 22. Some might know me as a mother random name. I teach English at training centers but I also live stream on TikTok for income. I’m north central China I teach IELTS to adults and young teens. This test determines ability to enter universities overseas. I liked this job. My name on TikTok was “YY”. It wasn’t really meant as anything. Rather random choice. I worked at a training center in a a shopping mall on the fourth floor.

I’m the middle of the layout of the school was an open office of desks piled amongst each other for teachers to lesson plan and for sales people to call for new customers to sign up their kids for private English lessons. I was sketching a poem on a notepad. It went like this:

“Useless as a glass door. You can peek through. Pigeon-toed. Drained an ocean to fill insecurities. Uncomfortable thoughts ricochet in me. Like an ambush. Giddy when disappointed. I build trenches amongst the tripwires of life. City feels like a tsunami. Manners like a bloated tick. Sipping the veins from any limb around me. As a stranger to a moth, a porch light pulling. Desolate in lost thoughts. Nights awake and bunkering in hotels. Soft in my voice, I hopscotch to hands—falling through like particles of sand. With enough friction to set off an atom bomb. To radiate right through me, and hollow my marrow. Amongst open nerves I can feel something, so I play with the pain. No matter how annoying.”

I was hopeless in love like an IV I needed straight to my veins to keep me afloat. My heart a constant faint rhythm. Love is a distraction. And it made me who I was as a person… my habits. The habits put holes through me like cheese. To be melted in another’s hands. See, when I first came to China at 22 and had my first manic episode involving psychosis. I had a job in Hechuan teaching at a university. I was so young as I graduated so young. My students were essentially the same age as me.

First time manic I tried to write a novel about my former heroin addiction. I had slit a pentagram on my chest and got obsessed with Aleister Crowley.

But I’m focused on that office where I was writing poetry as a usual coping mechanism. When my brain was overexcited it was like metaphors popped off like Roman candles in my brain.

That office was a sanctuary. I found the job through a middle aged woman I once hid under her bed in Chongqing when someone knocked on the hotel door. She promised to give me money to get a ticket to get on a slow train ride all the way to northern China in Taiyuan. It’s a city in Shanxi province.

This is a genesis of how I eventually became a content creator. A messy story. I had no visa at the time I had arrived in Taiyuan. I was being being paid under the table. It also leads to how I met a woman eventually in Shanxi who went by the name Ming.

Before all that I would like to introduce about a friend of mine…. Ming…

My thoughts transplant it her like we are a single organism.

With mania it is like a Ferris wheel on fire while I think about her.

Again, I, Taishen was sitting in the open office in Taiyuan at my English training center. When I daydream it is like my thoughts can transplant to others.

A door opened and plain clothed police officers came in to check passport to find people not on their correct visas for English teaching. My fraudulent Russian coworker tore his shirt with the logo off and sprinted to the emergency exit stairs. I’m still not sure whatever happened to him.

I hid away going through a different direction and did my best to fit in with the crowd of the mall as much as a white foreigner can in China.

Working under the constant fear of being arrested is much too stressful. And it was around this time I decided to meet up with Ming. It was her idea I could live stream for an extra income. First time I met Ming was on WeChat. This was a few months before she apparently met some Russian KTV host I heard about.

WeChat is a social media application in China and it allows the ability to search for other people nearby looking to meet new people. I met her there when I first arrived to Taiyuan after losing my job in Chongqing from a manic episode.

I initially didn’t want to meet her until she offered 2,000 yuan to meet at a hotel with her. Part of a cycled habit I made meeting people.

I feel meeting older women is a symptom of something rather horrible that happened to me when I was younger and I will never talk about it.

And like bumper cars in the city I kept meeting her.

I can’t remember. My thoughts are kind of breaking and splintering. Like some kind of erosion. But I feel my thoughts did transplant again at that moment.

Because it feels like as a break in reality to think how easily people are shuffled and moved around to manipulators needs.

Because inside I rather hate it. I hate the idea I was picked by Ming like she must have done many times when I was mentally ill and without security. It gives the worst feeling to know she threw her life at me like a tidal wave. Eroding at me. Waves of abrasion.

When I was frantic with the fear of being confiscated by the police or essentially trafficked by my job she was there for me. Buying my the sweetest things. Nights to KTV and Korean barbecue. Trips places afar. It was her idea I could I come dancing on a live stream. Maybe she was a bit voyeuristic.

….

Part 2 Ming

I’m always attending to my aquarium. I always found it therapeutic to attend to the plants, fish, and ph levels. Not much different than be a gardener. Call me Ming. I’m from Liaoning. From Dalian. But work often took my to Taiyuan. My mother is from Korea. My father is a Chinese farmer.

I work as a radio broadcaster. I do quite well for myself. I taking English courses at a local English training center. My job sometimes has me also writing stories on trips visiting Europe. I drive a new BMW every year and have three miniature schnauzers I dearly love.

I was feeling down. Had a boyfriend who was a Uyghur from Xinjiang. He was a talented equestrian Olympian. I found comfort in staying busy in my work. And nights at karaoke with my sisters at the KTV. In a lot of worries I shouldn’t have stress but I do. I have my needs met in many ways, but I don’t have love. My hurt is a planet needing something in its orbit. At the KTV me and my sisters would pay for men to sit and act like gentlemen towards us with social interaction. I was 34 with an interest in a American host who was 22. His name was Taishen and I grew to like his company. Always was an active listener.

Eventually he would stay at one of my four apartments with me throughout the city. The relationship blossomed. But there was a problem. I was getting jealous a lot with his job and his continued engagement with clients.

I fought the pain of it and even tried to ignore it. Until the point I wanted to erupt.

I threw my plates at him. He refused to comeback until I apologized. I grew to numb what I felt for the sake of him. But it was worrisome he might get taken away from another. Days became weeks, and then time went to months; then it was 7 months of love.

What to do. My mother was a devout Christian. Marrying a host would be unacceptable—especially any foreigner in general.

Searched his phone and messages to a woman in Chongqing that he obviously still deeply felt feelings for. I became like melted substance as my heart stopped.

All the effort to numb my feelings was not enough. Instead of confronting I went to my car. Drove to the beach to look at the Yellow Sea. Wishing to walk off or for the waves to grab my ankles and make me eaten like the fool I am.

My jealous heart took my mind like screws right into my forehead. Couldn’t get the thoughts off my mind. Ignored talking to him about it for days. I couldn’t stop the hurt. Like a face of neuralgia.

……..

Part 3

Ming-

I wash saved from the sea by a fishing boat and sent to a hospital.

My former roommate in the ward I shared a room with had paranoid schizophrenia. I was stuck in the same place due to mania, and just had got my diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

I was so pissed being stuck there and felt I had no business being there. I found my diagnosis to be an insult to me. Taken in on a stretcher. Made me feel very vulnerable and irritated.

My roommate was having delusions related to Christianity and could not stop waking me up in the middle of the night to ask and talk about Jesus. Left me beyond frustrated.

She was drifting from her husband and would go on and on about intending to leave him. Felt she was spied and plotted against by him. So we were both frustrated with being there.

The toilets were special. They would flush what needed to be flushed but not certain things like pills—it helped to keep people from hiding they were not taking their medications.

She had tried to flush his wedding ring down the toilet but he did not realize it didn’t flush. I went to use the restroom later and saw the ring. I told her. She took it out. She found it to be a sign form God that she was to stay with her husband, and there was immense happiness in her eyes.

…… Ming Part 4….

Hysteria is a Ferris wheel on fire. You can hop on. I was left feeling quite blue from not having a job to support me and my life before. I started live streaming too. Me men messaged me making requests to support me.

It was one day I sad on my knees on the ground like gravity keeps me on the ground. I typed to them on WeChat while I stayed on the live stream. My life was horrible and at this time.

Mental health a Ferris wheel of fire that others jump on.

He began stating her can complete my wishlist of gifts but I had to change.

I had to put on something more revealing. Show my leg. While I watched him on the video on WeChat masturbate to me.

Love,

Will we age like wine?

Finer things have perished for lessons pressed against the lips:

A lie told too early. A broken silence.

“Tulips and roses look like lovers,” you said quietly.

Nonsense. Lovely.

Did you always have a second face?

In another love, would we have been able? Would you have been known?

How many mirrors have to break before I look like hell?

Restitution.

I am, and miss you.

I notice, in reflections, that twinkle in your eye: the one you gave me.

We are of the same earth, children of the chase; The dust in our bones is a legacy we cannot revisit.

I have washed myself of your fingertips, distant looks, and lips.

Playgrounds; battlefields.

Wild-hair, do you remember that day: we went to the river, in April, and jumped in with our clothes on?

I knew i loved you, then. and every day.

i drove my car into another garden. I always get out, apologizing. Sorry, about that.

River

You left more behind, with me, than I imagine you intended to.

May I leave the memories that I still carry of you, also, behind.. Forgotten?

I am tired of being a ghost, in the land of the living.

I will always wander a little further than I meant to; A few steps, more, in search if what I have lost, and what never was.

When will the taste of your bitterness cease to linger, rotten, inside me?

Did you grow new flesh, while I consumed another neurosis?

The wind sometimes speaks your name, and I whisper with it, just to have the shape of you, once again, against my lips.

I’m a bipolar drug addict and this is my story.

Feedback welcome. Stay sane.