The Courtier Never Leaves

Waking up is an act of geological treachery, a slow volcanic effusion of the self into a consciousness that feels less like awakening and more like being extruded through a colonic aperture of time itself, and this morning—if one can dignify the grey smear between 3 AM and 11 AM with such a word—my mouth tastes of copper pennies and the metaphysical afterbirth of dreams that died in committee, the kind of taste that makes you wonder whether your tongue has been marinating in the bilious secretions of a disappointed god or whether this is simply what fifty-one years of unprocessed cortisol does to a man’s mucous membranes, and I lie there, supine, staring upward at a surface that has never once in three decades offered anything resembling an epiphany, a surface the color of old phlegm, and I think: depression is my most consistent courtier, through ups and downs certainly in downs naturally I can always find this old companion since I started having my bipolar swings in my adolescence, unnamed as it went for a long time until it was diagnosed in the US, and yes, the US, that glittering hemorrhoid of a nation where they charge you three hundred dollars to be told your brain is a defective radio picking up static from the Pleistocene, where the psychiatrists speak in the tonal register of automated customer service and prescribe you pills that make your genitals feel like abandoned real estate, but I digress, or rather, I regress, because that is the only direction this mind knows how to travel, backward, sideways, into the cul-de-sacs of memory where the wallpaper is peeling and the plumbing groans with the sound of ancestral disappointment.

My life’s been topsy turvy for years but now it’s kind of flattened into a monopoly of monotonous ripples of manic irritation and depression with a feeling of all pervading doom, and the precarity of my life especially my thin infrequent income lends a permanent bleakness to its distemper, and oh, what a distemper it is, not the canine variety though I often feel like a rabid cur circling the railway station of my own cerebellum, but rather a general disordering, a systemic maladjustment, which is precisely what my neurotransmitters have been doing since approximately 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and my internal wall between reason and raving developed its first hairline fractures, and I remember, or rather, my body remembers, the way the manic episodes would arrive like a phuchka vendor at a funeral, utterly inappropriate, glistening with tamarind sauce and the promise of gastric catastrophe, filling me with a grandiosity so bloated I could have applied for a position as Elon Musk’s ego, though now that Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire thanks to that SpaceX IPO in June—seventy-five billion dollars raised, valued at one point seven seven trillion, a number so obscene it should come with a trigger warning for anyone with an intact social conscience—I realize my grandiosity was merely the economy-class version of his first-class delusion, the difference being that his mania is subsidized by venture capitalists, but I digress, or rather, I regress, because that is the only direction this mind knows how to travel, backward, sideways, into the cul-de-sacs of memory where the wallpaper is peeling and the plumbing groans with the sound of ancestral disappointment.

And the money, or the absence of it, the thin infrequent income that trickles in like the weak serous exudate of a lanced abscess, weak, intermittent, humiliating in its lack of force, this is the substrate upon which my bipolar disorder grows like a fungus, a magnificent, iridescent, poisonous fungus, the kind that would make a mycologist weep with joy and a banker vomit with disgust, because precarity is not merely an economic condition, it is a neurological one, it is the constant low-grade activation of the amygdala, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis doing the tango in my thorax, cortisol coursing through my veins like cheap country liquor through a Calcutta slum, and every invoice feels like a prayer hurled into the void, an entreaty to the god of freelance checks, who is a capricious deity indeed, far more capricious than the gods of the Hindu pantheon, who at least have the decency to manifest in recognizable forms, whereas the god of freelance checks manifests only as silence, as the notification-free desert of an empty inbox, as the slowly dawning horror that another month has passed and the rent, the rent, the rent is a beast that must be fed, and I am fresh out of sacrificial goats.

The manic phases, when they come, are not the glittering, productive manias of the Instagram influencers, those polished creatures who claim to have ADHD and bipolar disorder as though they were seasonal accessories, no, my mania is a ragged, septic thing, a dog with mange, a phuchka vendor whose tamarind water has gone sour, it manifests as irritation, as a kind of cosmic itching, as if the universe were wearing a woolen sweater inside my skull, and I find myself arguing with the concept of refrigeration, the way it preserves things in a state of artificial stasis, much like my own existence, preserved in the formaldehyde of routine, and I pace, oh how I pace, from one end of awareness to the other, though I must not describe the landscape, for that would violate the terms of my own parole, and I think of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, married on July 3rd at Madison Square Garden, one thousand attendees, thousands of fans outside, a spectacle of such perfectly calibrated heteronormativity that it makes my teeth ache, and I wonder if they, too, have their private distempers, their midnight conversations with the abyss, or whether their serotonin receptors are as well-maintained as their publicists, and then I remember that wondering about the interior lives of celebrities is the last refuge of the intellectually bankrupt, and I return, as I always must, to the central ruminations, to the courtier who never leaves, the depression that sits in the corner of my consciousness like a durian fruit, reeking, magnificent, impossible to ignore.

It is the flatness that kills, the monopoly of monotonous ripples, the way the manic irritation and the depressive doom have achieved a kind of detente, a negotiated settlement, the Treaty of Westphalia signed in the synaptic clefts, and the result is not peace but a low-intensity conflict, a forever war, a Gaza Strip of the psyche where the borders are constantly shifting and nobody ever wins, and I wonder if my condition is a luxury of the post-industrial subject, a first-world problem exported to the third-world mind, and then I remember that I have not eaten since yesterday, that my stomach is producing sounds like a Kolkata municipal bus changing gears, and I realize that hunger is not a metaphor, it is a physical reality that anchors me to the earth even as my mind floats away on thermals of self-analysis, and I eat, or rather, I consume, something from a packet, something that tastes of sodium and resignation, and I continue.

And so I sit, or stand, or lie, in whatever posture the gravity of despair dictates, and I watch the light change, the way it filters through the atmospheric pollution, turning the afternoon into a kind of sepia-toned elegy, and I think of the future, which is a concept I approach with the same enthusiasm I approach a colonoscopy, and I think of COP31 in Antalya this November, where they will discuss the climate crisis with the same fervor and futility with which I discuss my mood disorder, and I realize that the macrocosm and the microcosm are not reflections but twins, conjoined at the amygdala, sharing a single failing heart, and I think of the 250th anniversary of American independence, celebrated last week with time capsules and fireworks and the usual orgy of self-congratulation, and I think of my own independence, which is less a declaration than a surrender, less a revolution than a slow, grinding attrition, and I wonder if in two hundred and fifty years anyone will remember the bipolar man from Calcutta who ranted into the void, and I know, with the certainty of a depressive episode, that they will not, and the knowing is a relief, a kind of negative grace, a benediction of obscurity.

My income is thin, infrequent, a ghost limb of financial security, and I have learned to live with the phantom itch of solvency, the way an amputee learns to live with the sensation of a foot that is no longer there, and I think of the neuroscience of phantom limbs, the somatosensory cortex maintaining its map of a territory that has been lost, and I wonder if my brain maintains a map of a self that has been lost, a pre-bipolar self, a self that could wake without tasting copper, that could look upward without seeing a Rorschach test of failure, and I know that this self is a fiction, a phantom, a ghost story told by the prefrontal cortex to keep the amygdala from screaming, and I accept, with the grim humor of a man who has spent three decades in negotiations with his own nervous system, that the phantom will never stop itching, that the map will never be redrawn, that the territory and the map have merged into a single, indistinguishable, magnificent, repulsive, endlessly fascinating, endlessly tedious, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.

The courtier bows. The courtier never leaves. The courtier has put on my skin and is answering emails. Nobody has noticed.

P.S. World Population Day (UNFPA); SpaceX IPO June 12, 2026; AI for Good Global Summit Geneva July 7-10, 2026; Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce wedding July 3, 2026; US Semiquincentennial July 4, 2026; COP31 Antalya November 2026; Mayon Volcano PHIVOLCS reports July 2026.