I am but a lowly servant in the court of my sister the queen. This is right and true and this is how our different stations came to be.

When I first returned to Vermont from New York City and was diagnosed as being bipolar I was very sick. I found myself in the hospital in Burlington. For the first few days, I would scream for no reason. I might have been reliving some of the night terrors I went through back in New York. I would also faint in the halls. Once I accused the poor nurse who was attending me of trying to poison me with the medicine. I was taking Lithium, a mood stabilizer, Trazadone an antidepressant and Haldol, an anti-psychotic. I screamed before she could hand me the pills and ran out of the room down the hall to the nurses station where I promptly fainted after making my declaration: “I am going to commit suicide one of these days and no one can stop me!” Then I collapsed and my head hit the floor with a loud clunk.

I must say I was an excellent fainter. I had no idea what I was doing or why. One nurse jumped back and screamed. They bundled me into a wheelchair. Still hollering, I was hustled to the locked ward one floor below. I thrashed and screamed inside a locked quiet room. The door opened and my sister rushed in. “Why are you doing this? Why won’t you cooperate with them?” she pleaded.

“Leave me alone, Michelle, “ I said solemnly. “I want to die and I’m going to die.”

She ran crying from the room. A few days later, I received the following letter in the mail:

Dear Cyn,
When you die, you’re dead and that’s it. You are just glamorizing it for some stupid reason. I know things went badly for you in New York. But what I don’t understand is why you won’t just try. You have to try to get better. You didn’t ask for this illness but you are fighting them every step of the way. The people there said you think they are trying to poison you. They are doctors. They are trying to help you but you have to help yourself. Please stay around on this earth if only for me. I love you and my life would be ruined if you died. It’s not a game. It’s your life.
I love you,
Michelle

I carried this piece of scribbled notebook paper around with me. It gave me hope. After they had given me a battery of tests in Burlington including wiring my head with electrodes to find out if the fainting was caused by me or by seizures (it was caused, inexplicably, by me) I started to calm down. Perhaps I should try to get better, I thought.

Still life on the psych ward could be upsetting all by itself. It wasn’t Disneyland. One woman walked around with a long electrical cord roped around her neck. She looked like she was just about ready for her hanging.

“Make her take it off,” I whispered to an aide. I shuddered whenever I saw her coming.

But I wasn’t the loveliest sight myself during my first stay. I never showered and wore the same sweatpants and sweatshirt day after day. Once I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror and saw what looked like a really scary psycho staring back. Like that woman in New York I had seen at the end in my bathroom mirror. I still didn’t recognize myself. A fellow patient told me she had been afraid of me but she wasn’t anymore because I was actually “pretty nice.”

Time passed so slowly on the psychiatric ward. I wouldn’t go to groups at first. I would lie on my bed in my dark room, tossing, turning and crying. Except when my doctor would come in and cheerfully tell me to “Rise and face the day!” I was getting excellent care. But I still felt miserable.

Then one Saturday my sister came. And every Saturday after that. She would bound into the room. “The queen is here!” she’d say throwing open the curtains. “She commands you to sit up and speak with her.”

I would laugh and sit up in bed.

“And now we will go for our stroll and sing our happy songs,” my sister would say. “Come with the queen,” and she’d hold out her hand.

We would walk up and down the halls which didn’t seem so threatening with Michelle by my side, swinging hands and singing quite loudly, “When you’re down and troubled and you need a helping haaaaaand and nothin’ nothin’ is going riiiiight.”

My sister, by the way, looked like she could hardly be related to me. Not remotely. While I was doing my impression of the woolly mammoth, same sweatpants combo, dirty socks, hair greased up, eyes wild, my pretty sister would be dressed in pressed jeans, an expensive sweater, high heeled boots and gorgeous leather coat. Her hair would be long and shiny and she’d be wearing makeup.

“Sing with me, Cyn Salabim!” she’d say grabbing my hand and swinging away. “You’ve got a friieeeeeend!”

The other patients would stop and watch us go singing by, even the nurses seemed surprised to see me with this attractive, happy-go-lucky woman. We’d swing up and down the hall until we landed back in my room. “Talk to me, tell me everything,” she’d say.

Since I was a little girl my sister has been saying, “Tell me everything.” I would talk about the lady with the cord and the bad food and the nice nurses and how I apparently wasn’t being poisoned after all. Until visiting hours were up and my sister had to go.

“Good,” she’d say. “You seemed a little better today. The queen is pleased and will be back tomorrow. She came for the weekend.”

And for every weekend after that, my sister would take the bus up from Boston to make me laugh and talk and stroll around singing.

“I can’t not come, Cyn” she said simply one day. “I have to see that you’re all right. You really scared me.”

She said that if the roles were reversed and she were ill in some Boston hospital I would spend my time devising funny gift baskets with balloons and teddy bears but I would never take the bus every weekend to see her. She was right.

It seemed no matter where I landed in a hospital whether it be in Burlington or Rutland, my sister would turn up right away. Even when I was placed in a private psychiatric hospital in Maine, the one out in the woods that seemed to scare me out of my wits, my sister was sitting in my room one afternoon on my bed waiting for me.

“Michelle! How did you ever find this place? Thank God!” I said. I hadn’t been there two days and I was petrified. “It’s really scary here, Michelle. The patients attack the aides. I just saw a young girl whack an aide on the head with her metal tray. The aides get together and take them down and put them in the quiet room. I have to get out of here!” I said breathlessly.

“It’s gonna be all right,” she said. “Just do as you’re told and stay out of everyone’s way. Now, sing with me. Siiiiing with me. When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it beeeeee.”

I giggled. “Let it be, let it be, let it be,” we sang at top volume. We decided to skip our strolls out in the halls at this hospital as you never knew what you might encounter next.

In between hospitalizations, my sister would invite me to her home where she would pay for everything from Chinese dinners to videos to passes at the Y. She loaned me $1,000 once when I was behind in my rent and when I tried to pay her back she said she was ripping up the check.

“I don’t think I deserve a sister like you,” I said.

“Well, that’s obvious. You don’t,” she replied. You don’t deserve the queen but you have the queen so be it.”

The last time I was in the hospital was only a little over a year ago. I had stopped taking my medicine and had become convinced, among other paranoid thoughts, that my phone was bugged. I talked to my sister almost every night but didn’t let on how sick I was becoming. One afternoon, right before I was hospitalized, I went to see my doctor at his office. I was hunched over in my chair in the waiting room. A little girl had gone up to her sister and said, “What does it mean, Michelle?” Only in my diseased mind that meant everyone and I mean everyone had been bugging my phones. Now the general public was repeating my own words back to me. They were all out to get me. I started sobbing. My doctor came out of his office and said sympathetically, “Oh, Cynthia, it’s alright. Come right in.”

Within a few days I was hospitalized at the Rutland Hospital. When a mean male patient bothered me, I fled to my room and sobbed, “What does it mean, Michelle? Why am I here again? What does it mean?” I must have cried for an hour in the dark. Suddenly, the light came on and my mother and my sister walked in the room. My mother said, “I think I’ll leave you two alone for a bit.”

“What’s going on?” said my pretty, stylish sister bouncing on the bed. “Tell me everything.”

I tried to tell her about the bugged phones and the little girl at the Counseling Center and everyone listening to me. She looked confused. Well, she wasn’t a doctor. Still, she always seemed to have the answer for me. “What does it mean, Michelle?” I asked her. I had the source right here. “What does it mean?”

“It meeeeeeans,” she said, “’Don’t go chang-in’ to try and please me. I never want to work that hard.’ Sing with me. Come stroll with me. Sing the happy song.”

I wiped my eyes. We paraded up and down by the nurses station swinging hands and harmonizing “just the way you aaaaaare.”

I started smiling, showing off my beautiful sister to the nursing staff.

“Don’t you feel better than sitting alone in that dark room? Don’t you feel better now that I’m here?” Michelle said.

The thing is, I always did feel better when she was there for me. And that is why I am but a lowly servant. And my sister is the queen.