Hope

Chapter 3

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2024

What's the difference between young love and BPD love? Well, you fall just as fast. But there's usually a plateau you hit-- where you aren't capable of loving more. A person with BPD, especially someone so young, will barrel through that plateau into territory where your partner becomes your favourite person. Someone you rely on to live. They are the cause for your happiness and abject depression. Without them, you have no purpose. It's terrifying, more so, the idea of losing them is terrifying. So you rather push them away. Because then at least your BPD is in control. But it's not always so bad loving with BPD. You're more sensitive, empathetic, romantic. And when it's good-- when your person with BPD is good, it's amazing. But more often than not when you do your introspection, or even just seeing a fruit at the grocery store, you are hit with the full force of their abuse and it is absolutely maddening.

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2017

My hands are sticky with blue slime, mouth thick with the saccharine honey and chocolate syrup mixture Mara and I had been chugging straight from the bottle for no particular reason other than I had brought it packed in my bag along with grey funeral garb when I realized showing up empty handed was rude. I purposefully didn't pack a spare change of clothes for the football game, always deriving joy from wearing other peoples clothes more than my own-- it was nice, to always feel like I was being bundled in a hug from someone I loved. It started with getting both my brothers' shirts as a result of being at the far end of the baby-clothes line, and then it slowly became stealing Sam's clothes, or some insignificant person I knew for two months in 9th grade. I didn't outwardly ask for anything— but I would surely never reject the offer.

I take a moment from listening to the crossbreed of country and Christian pop pouring from the speakers to take in the space around me I'd been in a handful of times, though usually when no one else was around.

The walls of Mara's room are a darker blue than the feature wall of my own, and I can feel my chest flood with a dull warmth when I find myself tacked among the photos on the twine of fairy lights above the bed that display all her most treasured memories and people.

My stomach tightens and unfurls as though a team of acrobats have begun a highly energized routine.

It's just Mara and I, but it feels as though there are a parade of suffocating people around me. My mind is boggled by Sarah's mercurial mother being there when her daughter isn't, but I don't find it quite important enough to ask because perhaps speaking the older woman's name is what summons her like a particularly heinous omen. Her thousand yard stare is just as skin-peeling as Greene's, and both have etched into my marrow now anyway.

I swallow thickly, knowing that none of the adults I've glimpsed in this house are anything good, or even particularly kind.

I know that, because I've seen it in the eyes of everyone that's ever taken from me and left me with a heavily wounded heart, or plucked innocence from my body like it was their right too. I twitch my neck when I see the same flashing of my best friend's eyes briefly in my minds eye.

I gulp when the prickling of fear rises like bile to fill my mouth. Sarah's mother doesn't know me, the eldest Campbell sister and the family matriarch doesn't. Greene surely doesn't. There was nothing to be afraid of, as I force my body to relax into the mattress that suddenly feels thick with discomfort. I practice something grounding, and fold the silver ring that I had at some point slipped off up in the slime over and over again until it's matte and lacklustre.

It's fine, it's okay.

"Why do you have matching rings with her?" Mara asks after a tentative silence befalls when the song playing ends.