English Class Shenanigans

Disordered and Disarrayed: Either Them or Me

My roommate is bipolar. She spent the first two weeks of school in a manic state, completing every assignment in ten minutes or so and going out to party for the rest of the day and night. I don't think she slept at all for those first two weeks.

After that, she went into a horrifically depressive state for around a week and a half. She didn't go to class, didn't come out for meals, and didn't leave her room more than twice that I was aware of. I left plates of food outside her door, but I was forced to throw it away.

In her manic states, she would concern me for a number of reasons. Once I was cutting some steak for dinner and she took the knife I had been using from the counter. "It's quite beautiful, isn't it?" she asked, admiring the blood dripping down the blade and onto her hand with a sickening fascination. "Umm yeah, I guess," I responded. The knife's been missing for a while. She once came home with red stains down the front of her shirt. When I asked her what had happened, she told me a story of how a server had spilled a glass of red wine on her and how hard she and her friends had laughed. It didn't look like red wine to me, but I didn't question it.

When she became depressive, she scared me for different reasons. I had to start locking up the sleeping pills I used the night before tests or when I was having trouble falling asleep because I caught her before she swallowed the whole bottle. When I knocked the pills out of her hand, she grabbed my wrist with a shocking amount of strength and looked me directly in the eyes. "There's no point. Why are you trying to stop me? There's no point to life, don't you see? Either they die or I die."

I started hiding the knives and other sharp objects around the dorm.

Once she shook me awake in the middle of the night. Sweat dripped from her forehead, gleaming in the light of her car's headlights shining through my bedroom window. "I need you. Please," she begged.

"What happened?" I murmured, reaching to turn on my bedside light.

She grabbed my wrist. "No time. We have to go." She breathed in short gasps and looked around with wild eyes as if someone was following her.

I didn't have time to question anything as she pulled me out of bed and dragged me out to her car. It reeked of rotting meat. As she began to pull out of the driveway, I saw red and blue flashes behind us, accompanied by wailing sirens. "What the hell did you do?" I yelled, now fully awake but only starting to grasp at what was going on.

She turned and stared at me with wide, bloodshot eyes. "It was either them or me." She whispered.

My roommate was bipolar. Was.

She's not much of anything anymore. After she crashed the car into a telephone pole, her frontal lobe was damaged to the point where she couldn't really do anything. She doesn't remember what she did, and I never did truly figure it out.