I am mentally ill. People don't want me to say that. They don't want me to define myself in that way. After all, no one says "I am cancer." They say, "I have cancer." And there, really, lies the difference. I don't have mental illness; it has me.
I am broken.
There are different degrees of broken, not unlike degrees of murder I suppose. Even then, a murderer is convicted of a particular degree of murder and that doesn't change. Degree of broken changes. Most of the time, until recently, I've been like a chipped china cup; pieces broken off around the edges but still essentially intact. Serviceable. Useful.
But then things happened.
My father was seriously injured. I quit my job to move home to help him. An enormous strain on an already taut relationship. My mother is angry about supporting me financially. I fear I will never find another job. I discover a dear friend has died. Another dear friend dies.
Every one another chip until I am more pieces than whole. The stress breaks me into more and smaller pieces. Any whiff of the control I think I have is carried away on the laughing wind.
Somewhere in the chaos, I found another broken one, one I knew I should have stayed away from for a variety of reasons. The moth is always attracted to the flame that will be her undoing.
Instead, I clung to him like driftwood in a hurricane.
Broken people tend to collect each other, you see.
No one else really wants us anyway, not the way we are. Others want to fix us, make us whole, but it's like trying to put together a puzzle that's missing some of its pieces and has extra pieces from another. And did I mention the picture on the box is of another puzzle entirely?
The thing about broken ones that makes us so attractive to each other is that we don't try to fix each other. We respect each others broken-ness.
Instead we listen. We understand the unbelievable agony of becoming broken, of being broken. We understand that no two are broken in the same way and we ask questions about the other's broken-ness. We want to understand them, to know their story and love them in spite of it. We understand what a rare gift it is to feel understood, to be accepted, to be valued in spite of your damage, maybe even because of it. We want to give them these rare gifts.
He gave me those gifts and, I hope, I gave them to him.
This other broken one and I became something to each other. Something utterly beautiful. Something extraordinarily precious. Something intense beyond description.
Then we crossed a line that we both thought we could ignore, I think. Or maybe we just wanted to ignore it so badly we convinced ourselves we could. The lies we tell ourselves are the easiest to believe.
We were wrong. We could not ignore it and, having crossed it, one of us could not go back.
He will not see me.
He will not speak to me.
I asked him if it was okay to remember the good things, the laughter in the diner, the profound things said. He never answered. I fear he will burn me from his memory entirely, exorcise me like some demon, like the evil that I am.
I am shattered.
It seems impossible to find two pieces even large enough to fit together and I don't want to fix it anyway. If I do, the fact that there is a very large and very important piece missing will be even more apparent, the large and beautiful piece of himself which he gave to me and which he took away with him when he left.
The pain is unbearable. Indescribable. My soul has been dipped in acid and left to sizzle and pop in the window of a chemist's lab somewhere. I physically hurt, all the chronic pain intensified, my skin prickles with thousands of tiny explosions of hot pain. Sleep runs from me, then catching me from behind, tackles and smothers me. I wake from strange dreams with strange and intense pains, only to be dragged back down into more. These wonderful, beautiful memories haunt me, taunt me. I know he still remembers but I know too that he's killing me off a memory at a time. I can feel him murdering my memory. I stop on the stairs for no reason, suddenly wracked with sobs that literally bring me to my knees, and I know he's burning a memory of me.
All I have left is a period. On the night he told me he had to cut me out of his life like a cancer, I burned his period on my wrist with a cigarette. Three, actually. And if it doesn't scar, there will be three more. I would have done a tattoo but his religion forbids them. A scar is more appropriate anyway.
A period is supposed to mark the end of one sentence and the beginning of another. In this case, it is only the end.
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