A Reflection by a BPD patient
Surviving this Decade
Bullets were pounding me in the shower this morning, big and
clear. I could hear their music sadly drifting downriver as we lay with our
fingers aflame. If I knew where this all went wrong then I’d collect
the remnants of unwritten apologies and glue them back together. Understanding
the frozen looks I receive, I just laugh louder, a little bit more obnoxiously.
It’s just voices looming over the state of Illinois.
Long haired women line the street, their arms waving in the air. They are
violent in their pursuits while I calmly accept this as yet another misdemeanor.
(It is not a good idea, but I follow the hole is my stomach). I never understood
this game, but I want to stand high on the edge of my bathtub and see.
My beliefs are as unsystematic as my clothing—as flimsy as my promises
to myself. I am cruel in my reasoning: delighted to slowly wonder how ignorant
my own existence might be. How lonely it could seem if this hadn’t happened
for a reason, if each moment was only irrelevant time.
We spend our nights articulating our stupid epiphanies, reasoning how god
meant for people to see through a more natural eye. And historians would question
our self-defeating plans while I find soil and sound more beautiful.
When stones fall from the sky in a white tiled space, I want to see Wy, and
why.
I have scraped myself into the undeserving—the one who doesn’t
know right from wrong and just when I want to be left out of this sad story,
I find undeniable ties. Things aren’t what they seem anymore, I say,
whispering among the diminutive crowd of people sanding before me. My meaninglessness
is deliberate, and they are infatuated by the nonsense and imaginative ideas
that are lost in my fractured reality.
Her pain is invisible. It breathes out of the air conditioner in her car,
disguised in that green, like Hockney’s California lawns. It’s
unreal, too, that lime, which is why art is better than life.
We lined up against our own odds and fought. Surrendering means everything
and sometimes I want to – to remind myself that I am stuck—that
forever is limited and so am I.
Slam
Early mornings, I woke up to the sound of voices that I didn’t
know. And reaching over I slammed, slammed my pretty polished fingers down
onto that off button and said “no more” and rose and fell and
sang and showered and fell once again, helplessly back into bed.
And pretending that there is reason…he sits down. His eyes are sincere.
“It means nothing to you.” I am silent for the moment.
It is so small in green. Genuine. “I guess I was naïve or I wasn’t
or it just didn’t matter.”
Late at night, I watched and waited, sleeping awake helplessly to sad and
upbeat music, turning everything into some subliminal message of why not this
and why not that and don’t answer me or ever say that but it is truly
killing me deep down; I will never admit it.
Poised and running around sixteen sided monuments (in time I won’t)
and carrying some body over some line, imaginary though it may be. In early
afternoon, those cold looks, ice and eye and sending me out and across the
hall. Manic, quiet, reserved. Chilling to escape or to return and spring into
the night and the darkness and the silence and the misery and the laughter
and the tears and the one outside who drinks, drinks, drinks, and I wash my
face and fall asleep.
* The pieces above were so kindly shared with us by a friend who suffers from BPD.