Devise a plan. Look at how amazing I am! I cater. I am a caretaker. The bond between mother and son is unbreakable, un-abandonable. Listen until your ears melt like the wax of candle: progressively getting smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left. Evaporate. Disfigure yourself. I can’t remember what I like or what I use to do. The sentence “I am.” is not one I relate to. “I would do anything…” is its placeholder. I pretend to know things I don’t. His takes on nuclear energy are fascinating although a bit uninformed (a sentence I fear may hurt feelings). I drink socially to fit in. I go places where I don’t want to be. I owe him, meeting family is supposed to be reciprocal, so I fiddle with my underserved glass. I part my lips only to drink. Stuff it all down. That is the new “am”. 

Make my world spin until I get nauseous and puke chunks on your face. Make me be perfect. Now that man is waiting for me to leave his apartment. He won’t even tell me to go. He telecommunicates instead. 

2. Spin 

That apartment was my home: I had a side of the bed, a janky coffee machine that went “drip, drip, drip.”, my valentine’s day card was displayed on his bookshelf like a stag’s head. Agreeing to say “I love you” as soon as it was official. The atlas was spun. The first half: happy sex, sad sex, make-up sex, breakup sex, just sex. The need to perform is a beast. The atlas made my eyes dart back and forth, back and forth, it was nauseating. 

Clichés: “I hate you.”, “I love you.”, “I need you.”, “You’ve made me grow.” Did it matter? “In a few months, if you feel better, I’m going to ask if you still care.” (fucking psycho). I’m like a fucking moth, drawn to the light I imagined in you, jumping on your skin, ugly and irritating. For the first time, I felt truly loved. Half the time I came over, I drenched the pillow with tears. Endless praise and neglect were home. I clutched onto the walls until my fingers bled. You left me without skin. Fuck you, fuck relationships, fuck people that stay friends with their ex, fuck BPD, fuck those five months, fuck January, fuck May and so on. Stay in my life. You’re gone. Eclipses, restaurants, claw machines and pink quills, they all went away.

3. Distortion 

I don’t “do” anymore. It seems I don’t know what I like. I used to. I listen to you, I cook for you, I reassure you, I try to find solutions for you, I climb into your neurons and interpret what you say into what you mean like a fortune teller. The words you speak always seem to mean something else. You create new synonyms out of thin air. I don’t even think you know what I used to do. I think you’ve mastered the verb. You see friends, you play board games and dungeons and dragons, you read occasionally, you go to work, you look for different job, you go on runs, you put off seeing me and you put your whole body weight on me when we nap. I knew myself so well. I cooked and baked for everyone, I read more than you do, I wrote more too. I made jewellery before you ever bought me some. I was. I was detailed and cradled dough so softly. I spent great attention to the intricacies of sliding beads onto wire, and not on removing dust and lipstick from a collar. The colour, shape, weight and size of beads were imperative. I gripped onto things.And, one day, I found myself waiting for you to grip my hand while lazily strolling on a cracked sidewalk, until I gave up and grabbed yours, hopping you’d want it.

4. Breakneck 

I used to be addicted to weed. I’ve scammed my parents out of hundreds of dollars just so I could keep smoking every day. Remember when I came to your apartment two weeks after we met, and I told you I had a psychosis? I forgot your name while it was happening. Besides imagining conversations, hallucinating visuals and almost bawling my eyes out because I couldn’t remember my partner’s name, I liked it.

I remember my first family meeting in the psych ward. My parents were glaring at me angrily as they were explaining to the psychiatrist, the psychiatrist’s intern, the psychologist and the social worker how I was a big fat liar that they couldn’t trust. My mother feigned the ever-so-responsible parent and started talking about how she’s noticed scars on my arms. That is, until I spoke up and said, “I don’t cut there.” Obviously, no one had anything to say. I’ve gotten into strangers’ cars, apartments, been violently drunk and high in public in the dead of night, I did coke that a stranger offered me on the street, committed acts of vandalism, binging and starving, public urination, cut my bangs impulsively at 4 am. Unsafe sex. A classic. You would know.

5. Red Leg 

Scarlett was my favourite colour. As red as a patriarch. How threatening I once was; like a child. Me and the other babies would discuss the 27 club with great enthusiasm, thinking we were cool and different. My best friend loved maroon, my next few best friends too. Red like fury dripping onto my mother’s cheeks; red like my brothers’ favourite firetrucks. His favourite colour was red too. His eyes glazed over when staring at red stop lights, toy trucks and red running shoes with cartoons printed all over them. A little boy running down the streets so quick his dust turns red. He stopped for a while. He loved red differently as a teenager. 

 I’ve always had trouble picking a favourite colour. I never thought it mattered much. I knew I loved the number 24 and school. School was a comfort, I liked pencils and paper, the type with blue lines enveloping it and three holes punched into it. School was less calming when I started to love pencil sharpeners, scissors and handicap stalls. People who love red start to hate it but in the way you hate being in an abusive relationship. Eventually they crave beige. It’s just so “bleh”. It’s just ordinary. I’m not sure if you ever loved red the way I did. I know you loved people who loved it. I know you loved artists who painted you in shades in shades of red, purple and blue. Red leg. I think you felt indifferent to red, maybe captivated at most. I think you preferred lady bugs; the type of bugs that bite. You like being bitten.

6. Chronic Emptiness

7. Bughouse 

I miss being told what to do, when to eat, when to sleep, being gently encouraged to shower, left to do nothing but watch others play card games as I peer at them with a book between my hands. I miss huffing hand sanitizer, going from laughing with the loons to resisting the urge to scream at the newest admission. A drug dealer stole me a pencil once, we weren’t allowed to use pencils unsupervised. 

I want someone to hand me pills in a little plastic cup every morning and watch me swallow them. I haven’t taken my meds in over six days. I miss people leaving me alone when they saw me sob because I asked them too. I miss the calm. For some reason, mood swings are an issue here. I miss being ten, when my parents made me look well-adjusted. I miss my mother screaming at me, calling me spoilt as I shrank onto the floor and took unsteady deep breaths. I miss maniacally laughing, crying and screaming at my little brother. I miss my grace period. With you, I thrived in ups and downs: from excessive kisses to fearing you’d leave me. I miss shutting down all my emotions to comfort you (predictable instability). Now, I recede into myself, like a snail into its shell. My instability is too much to share but it inevitably pops out and rears its slimy antennae.

8. Pyromania 

Three weeks post-mortem, we met up for an autopsy. We (I) went organ by organ, analyzing the cancer and how/where it spread. You failed to tell me what stage we were at. We discussed. And then, you told me how you started dating your co-worker. A tumor with teeth and hair, the remnants of an absorbed fetus; something infantile and disgusting. I did the math. Two weeks after we broke up, one after we slept together. In the liver. I made myself small (a bad habit). It spread. Granted, you never asked me to, but I did it for you. I took all my therapy skills and lit them on fire. 

I burnt down cities for you. Radiation. My father went through radiation when I was 13. I can still hear the sounds of him breaking plates while I stood barefoot next to ceramic shards sobbing in my nightgown. I wish I could join him now. Men are the only ones allowed to break things. I had spent the previous five months feeling incredulous: at your actions, your words. Interpretation is futile. The feeling remains in its purest form. I should’ve stabbed myself when I had the chance. Stage 4? I should’ve planned for it, a eulogy. I should’ve planned for it.

9. Transient and Severe 

You cherished me like one cherishes a good grade. Something based in relief and a feeling of accomplishment. I’m starting to think relationships are how you keep yourself alive. You consume affection like it’s oxygen. Novelty too. You and your new girlfriend are plotting against me. Your success indicates my failure. I find myself daydreaming about something worse: that my next relationship will end in death and betrayal. It gives me the right to be sad. Dissociating makes you less real. This is supposed to be temporary. It’s been six months, one day and approximately one hour. The past is dragging itself into my present. Everyone is hostile. They should know they can’t hurt like I do. Couples are against me too. They’re showing off more than usual. Sometimes I stare into a wall and remember that you used to put brown sugar cubes into your coffee. I’d watch them sink and dissolve while holding my breath. As if something unexpected was about to happen. I get that feeling whenever I unexpectedly catch a whiff of that incense you gave me. No one’s allowed to light it anymore. It persists. I think you’re starting to make me dizzy. I almost passed out yesterday. I am no longer the master of my body. It shakes and sways regardless of what I intend it to do. It’s a slow sort of mental decomposition. My fingertips escape my hands. I’m not sure they’re there sometimes.