My Blog and first chapter of a free book

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I have a lot of writing on my blog, and the more people who read it the better. My Mad Universe

This is something I worked on last night. I think some of my memories and experiences point to Aspergers.

Fallen Sparks
a memoir

Gabrielle Bryant copyright 2013


This book is a non-fiction memoir about my life struggles with confusing mental illness in the family. It skips around a bit as its a novel in progress.


Chapter One:
Who am I?


When I was little I remember asking my parents what God was like. My mother told me that God was kind of like Santa Clause; so I envisioned myself standing next to a big jolly man staring into a snow-globe that overlooked the world below. I told God that my parents looked so happy. He told me I could visit this world to learn about life, and that I had to learn about the dark and the light in everything. God said that I would have a happy life for a very long time, but it would not always be this way.

As a child I would tie my shoelaces and think about God, and I would walk down the stairs and contemplate the universe. I walked around the neighborhood acting like a tomboy, sometimes feeling very alone in my little world. I’d talk to God in certain areas where I could feel him more, usually in high peaks in the forest. I would dream of visiting other places and the wind and trees would call to me. I never heard voices or angry beings, but God talked to me in the trees and the wind and the flowers. It was my way to embrace this confusing realm.

Come to my Universe, and let the colors and shapes move you as if you’re in a trance; distant voices will guide you into their own dimensions with different ways of seeing. Be wary of the demonic delusions that can give you anything you want, but also everything you fear. Use your imagination, but don't let it kill you with questions and unsolved riddles. Let it free you. Let it make you believe you can fly, because maybe someday we will.

This is the world God left behind—to us. It is his strange archaic painting, it breathes life to us, it leaves us crying and full of energy and passion. There you are—embracing everything in your innocence as the statuesque indoctrinated people continue to weave around you, looking for a home in the stars. No one knows the real you; no one may ever know that strange girl in the corner, the shy one who didn't speak up loud enough for anyone to hear. I have no choice but to take these pills. Such a smug depression settles over your twisted little happy world; You'll repeat their mantra to yourself as the skies turn grayer and your skin itches with anxiety and rage. What is it that you feel in a world so unreal?


With your head down, not wanting to meet anyone's gaze, you walk on. It’s not like they were looking anyways. You continue on your quest with with awkward strife. The sun burns for you in the midst of this entire struggle; being a disciple of insanity, you twist concepts to your own fancy. You can make it how you please, this is your cursed disease. Intelligent, inspired, and broken. A world of memories left unspoken.

Alienated by desire. Stuck on this planet that’s becoming an empire. The noises fill your brain, their screaming again. She wonders why adults call her an old soul. She can say “pass me the orange juice” from her high chair, and she’s only two years old. Most people pay it no mind as they continue on to nowhere."How can she be that smart?" they ask themselves. So you invent your new world all the better, because you know the secret to life was taken. The woman with shiny yellow hair who encouraged you to be all you were, and the happy man with curly hair who refused to give you to the demons.

Long ago, before the coffee and the cigarettes, before the magic of adventure and the pain of sorrow, there was a place where we were all the same. We believed in something truly visceral, but then we lost our way home and the secrets left to be dug up by the future. We remain somewhere beneath the surface, in a world tired fighting coexistence. This curse...Schizophrenia. Oh how we refused to love. We could not be defenseless; so that we would learn how badly we needed to know this was no longer our Universe. Woe is the disciple of insanity, the sacrificial schizophrenic who dreams of building castles out of sand.


I’d love to scribble down these colors, make a picture book of my story and then never erase it, never let it dissolve on the tongue of your disciples. I wish I could just hold the pencil in my hand and scribble a whole universe onto these walls. For though they feel along the passages in the ever present ‘now’, I am still thinking about a place long before. It was one winding roller coaster ride through heaven, hell, and all those places where the sight cannot reach. This is an attempt at creating a story of the metamorphosis. This is how l recreated myself and defied all odds. The story begins in the present, as the writer begins to paint a vivi portrait of her life. She sits here upon her turquoise couch in the living-room. She is listening to the sound of silence. Her mind gives in to the memories at last.

Let me bring you into a time that is all too familiar to me. I remember him smiling at me, overcome with such a joy at seeing his little girl born. I cried without knowing whether they were tears of sorrow or joy. I remember smells and colors. Then I remember the faces, and comments. "She has such gorgeous blue eyes!” I was nearly six months old when I began speaking adult sentences. I talked a lot, almost too much. I remember sitting at the table and pretending to be an adult because it made me feel responsible and beyond the short little girl I was. When I was home, sometimes I felt removed from the rest of the world. I made my own adventures and friends to kill time. But I truly wanted to stay young forever.
When my mom had been ready to give birth to me, my dad had to rush her to the hospital. It was very icy and snowy that year. He had to break the door open just to get in the driver's side. All the way to the hospital he had to hold onto the door to keep it from flying open. I was born on January the thirteenth 1989. We used to go lots of places after my family decided to move to Pittsburgh; for me there was always something to do there.
I remember my dad would take me on walks through the park in a baby carrier. He took me often on walks through the city, parks, coffee shops, sometimes I wanted to go to graveyards and admire the celestial and surreal feeling it gave me. I walked and talked like normal kids, but I had a sense of hyper-intelligence which helped me write and create an effective world of ideas that I believe were mature for my age. I can remember as far as two the most vividly. I suffered nightmares when I turned three that involved floating to the ceiling and not being able to get down. We lived in a green and blue house, with cloud painted walls. I lived in an apartment when I was one, and I would sit and flip through the channels by the time I turned two and three. I was three and a half when we moved out of the green house to the castle house. I liked taking care of ants and animals. I used to sit on the stairway of the house with the terrace and admire the stained glass window. But it had a crack down the right side that let the light shine down. I had such an abstract way of thinking that I can recall these memories easily. I had an odd way of empathizing with objects. Not only did I empathize with stuffed animals and dolls, but buildings and structures.
My brother was born April fourth 1993. I was at the apartment with my aunt who was babysitting me while mom was in labor but they were keeping it a secret from me. We got a call from my dad who told us to come there and hurry. I have an image of when we first reached the birthing place where mom was. My dad opened up the door and had a look of both surprise and urgency. He told us to hurry up and come in. Inside, everyone was beaming. My grandparents were there. They gave him a doll that I played with and named Joshua.
Life was grand for a long time. In preschool I had a great time making walls out of fake bricks before everyone knocked them over, but I never liked kindergarten that much. My teacher had blond hair that stuck out on either side. She was always taking off points and putting me in "time out" for arriving there late or defending friends. There's not much I have to say about Kindergarten other than I made a bunch of friends and loved to tell the other kids stories about dragons and princesses. In the first grade I took part in the school plays. I had a lot of lead roles and my dance partner was obsessed with me. We would share mint mouth spray at recess and sometimes kiss. I went to a Catholic school. My first grade teacher was stricter with me because I took so much time perfecting answers on tests. The fondest memories come later on, when I was six and seven years old. By then I was an ambitious girl who wanted to be a singer and a dancer. I was always looking for an adventure as well. I often times acted like a tom-boy: watching power rangers and playing with toy cars. I also loved going on hikes in the woods and climbing hills.
I made up names for places, and in the section of Pittsburgh we lived in had buildings that were over three-hundred years old. There was an even more realistic castle there, with a terrace; I would go up onto the roof and over-look the world from above. I was always off in my own separate world and i liked to write stories. I was the mother of two dollies, Samantha and Kelly. Kelly was a Christmas present. She was one of those new born dolls that could eat and wore a diaper. I took to her as if she were the real thing. I was also a bad girl. I convinced my child friend to run away with me and pile things in front of a random basement so our parents couldn’t get us. I also threw a beer bottle over the terrace and the landlord saw it.
I took my time with everything that others began to think I had a learning disability, and the other kids would rush by me calling me names. I remember when my dad first walked me to my school in the beginning of first grade. I would run down the long steep hill which led to our house until I got to the stop sign, swung around it three times to gain balance, and then took a left on 13th street towards my catholic school. I had repetitious behaviors such as circling around trees. Bells scared me. One of the lunch ladies rang her bell right next to my ear and I think it traumatized me.
I learned how to perfect printing out words and then in the second grade I learned cursive handwriting. In the first grade we did simple add and subtraction and in the second grade we learned multiplication. At some point I fell behind in my reading classes, though, and had to take a recess class. During the class I spent my time folding tissues and making them into purses. Nearing the end of second grade was when things started to fall apart. My mom was sleeping hours on end. I would come into her room wanting to cheer her up and to do something like we once did. We used to do so many things; she was the one who nourished my imagination so much. We had big art projects, anything I could think of we created. My dad would always take me to museums and libraries.
He often brought me presents when he got home from work at U.S. Steel as a computer programmer. I walked to school every morning from my house. It wasn't a very long walk, maybe two miles, and I loved walking. I wasn't going to go to the third grade at the Catholic School, because at the time my parents weren't getting along too well and my dad threatened divorce. They fought a lot about bills, spending money, and I always tried to stop them by putting myself in the middle of it Then they would get mad at me. This turned into a never-ending cycle for me, they got mad. I tried to get them to stop fighting, and then they would say they were only "having a discussion" and not an argument. Well it was a very loud and angry "discussion".
Our house was made of stone and built by prisoners or settlers, I’m not sure which. I had always gone over to an adult’s house to play darts when I was bored. I beat her at darts and she said I had a really good eye. I think my talent scared her, as she was the one who taught me. I don't know what caused my mom's depression. It might have been influenced by a number of factors, she had gained weight after the pregnancy and her feet always hurt from a muscle condition that runs on her side of the family. My parents were fighting all the time and her feet really hurt. But mom just wasn't the same. She wouldn't wake up even after I shook her repeatedly. She didn't want to play or talk or anything. I talked to God and I talked to trees.
I also had imaginary friends which I had named. I had a friend in the neighborhood and our parents didn't get along. His mother thought I was a bad influence on him and told my mother that she didn't want us playing together anymore after I had convinced him to run away with me when our parents came to get us. When he described some morbid things about her and she overheard, she thought I had somehow told him to say those things. Mom saw a doctor who prescribed her Phentermine which would help her weight alongside of Prozac for depression. I remember seeing the bottle of pills and thinking of it as wrong, that she shouldn't take them.
I saw them as the evil things that were ruining her life. Things started getting scary. Mom was very emotional and not making any sense. She would tell me stories about things that had happened to her in her childhood. She was venting all of these suppressed memories that I thought were real. She didn't know that they weren't. Jim, who she was supposed to marry, was banished from the family by her parents and she was meant to find Jim. He was her true love.
I also have a memory of a story, but she confused me about it because she often changed her stories in an instant. One day her father had made her a cherry pie to bring to school and she had forgotten to take it with her. In one instance I remember she said he got mad at her about it and beat her with a belt. And at another instance he had come all the way to school just to bring her the cherry pie. She had a special box were she had all her special items.

She told me that when she was little she had set out a whole selection of pictures down and then suddenly the pictures started flying around the room. "What did your mom say?" I asked

"Well she screamed...they didn't believe me...they didn't believe it was magic." Magic was everywhere, it was my childhood, and now it had become something else to me. Something evil, twisted, it was as if I had become lost as I would stare out the window, wishing to escape this torment. What was going on? Was it the my fault? Had I upset her? Did she love me anymore?

My parents were fighting about everything and dad didn't know she was sick...he didn't know it was because of all the pills that she wasn't making any sense. I prayed for them not to get a divorce.

I was sitting in the living room as she stood in the doorway and suddenly announced "I'm going out."

"Where are you going?" I asked innocently.

"I'm going to fight bad guys." She said and I knew I had to be strong for her, so that the bad guys wouldn't get her.

The thing is that I remember dad had been saying that she was doing just that, going to fight bad guys. She ended up at a bus station and then was taken to some hospital and stayed there for what seemed like forever.

We moved into my grandma's house on my dad's side. I always asked about her, "When is mom coming back? Where is she?" Dad said that she was at a hospital because she wasn’t well. I didn’t know what was wrong with her. So I would ask and ask. He said she was away and that she was sick and needed to get better.

"Your mom is sick." He would tell me. “But she’ll be coming home. I just don’t know when.”

"But when will she come home?" I would ask. "When she’s ready," Dad would say reassuringly. Finally, in a few weeks we got to visit mom where she was in the hospital. I never knew why she was there until I had my own crisis at seventeen.

She used to sing to us before bed.

My brother was her teddy-bear and I was her sunshine. She had written a letter to me and handed it to me when I visited along with an angel penny. She told me on the letter how much she loved me. At the end of the letter she quoted the song, "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine" she was bright and happy and there were wheelchairs. She was sitting in a yellow seat. She was beaming to see us. Then finally, we all went home.

“Don’t let them take my sunshine away.”

I don't know what happened when she was there, all I know is that she doesn’t talk about it anymore. When years later my dad told me that she had tried to commit suicide, I was in shock. She had told me something else, and he hadn’t told me the reason she had been hospitalized. He was trying to protect me.

I had thought she had just lost it because of the Prozac and Diet Pills. The doctor had over prescribed her on Prozac and that's what pushed her over the edge. My mom has said that as well, and then my dad said she was overdosing on her own.

Afterwards, after she had been taken to the hospital, my parents hardly saw each other. My mom got her own apartment in Pittsburgh and my dad moved back to stay at his mom's house. Mom and I would spend every Monday watching a certain TV-show and I made a good friend, Barbara, who lived below in the apartment. Her parents were divorced too, she told me, and she didn't like having to go back and forth. I had to go back and forth between parents for a while.

I went to third grade at my Grandma’s and I got pushed around sometimes but mostly I was having trouble in school, one teacher dumped my desk because it was messy, and made me write things during recess. The classes seemed to be too hard for me.

I had no interest in cells or punctuation and grammar. I had more fun staying at my cousin's house. We became very close at that age and still are close friends now. We spent a lot of time exploring forests, parks, making up stories. I was still imaginative but also had gained some weight.

I began eating more and people called me fat. That Christmas of ‘97 we celebrated at mom's house. We had a small Christmas tree but it was a really special Christmas because that was when my mom and dad decided to get back together and move to West Virginia.