hospital beds:: remington leith au

[chapter eleven]

mild trigger warning brief mention of self harm

i guess i should tell you my story now too, shouldn't i?" i ask him through my tears. he nods

"i'd like that, ma chérie."
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i nodded slowly, taking a deep breath and sniffling, blinking back some tears as i prepare to tell the story of my life.

"i'll be honest, my life is kind of weird" i start, trying to procrastinate a bit "i never met my dad. he left when my mom told him she was pregnant. to be fair i'm kinda glad i've never met him if that's how he acts. that was really low of him. my mom got into a new relationship not long after she had me though and remarried when i was 5. my stepdad- his name is kenneth and i truly hate him- has always been mildly verbally abusive to me. he'd call me shitty names and degrade me for fun, but never when my mom was around. i genuinely believe he's the reason for most of my internalised self hatred" i explain to him, that being the start of the strange story that is my life.

"baby-" he starts but i shake my head, cutting him off before he can finish his sentence. he frowns, but i decide to continue the story.

"once i was like, 11 or so, my mom totally stopped caring about me. she told me i was old enough to take care of myself. i definitely was not. that's when my borderline started presenting itself. i got really impulsive, i'd stop caring about myself or others for like weeks at a time, i'd have mood swings and anxiety attacks multiple times a day. it was awful and horrifying, especially as a preteen who had no clue what was going on. i'm sure you understand that feeling though. anyway, here's the weird part. when i was 13, i had this super bad swing, outburst, thing in front of my mom and kenneth. my mom didn't believe something was wrong with me, so i figured i'd prove it to her. i grabbed a vase full of flowers, threw it against a wall, shattered it, picked up a piece of the broken glass and slit my wrists, while the two of them watched and made no attempt to stop me. my mom ended up taking me to the hospital though and of course they had to eval me because i showed signs of being suicidal. they spent a few years testing me because at that point, i was still sort of covered by this provision they have against diagnosing people with borderline if they're under 18. legally, they can diagnose you if you're over 13 years old, which is how old i was at the time, but they wanted to make absolutely sure what was wrong with me. so when i was about fifteen, i finally got diagnosed with severe borderline personality disorder, after quite some time of having different labels slapped on me, and they put me on a few different meds to try and regulate me. well that shit fucking sucked. so when i was like 16, i flushed a few bottles worth of pills down a toilet and stopped medicating. everything between then and now is kind of hazy, if i'm honest, but i had another strange outburst in front of my mother not long ago and now here i am" i finish telling, not realising that i'm still crying, remington occasionally wiping away my tears still even though he himself has black, makeup filled tear stains dripping down his face. he smiles at me sadly.

"you are so, so, so unbelievably strong, ma chérie" is all he says to me. after he finishes that sentence, we fall back into silence, holding each other close. i think we both realised, on this day, how lucky we are to have each other. how incredible it is that either of us is even alive right now.

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max wrote this chapter because i was spending time with my family. please remember to vote and we love you guys! xx