You think by loving someone, you can speak on behalf of them, completely understand them but, I was with someone for five years who looked straight through me.
I can’t even recognize my own reflection in the mirror most days and I poke and **** at my skin to make sure it’s real almost daily. I want to displace the sensation that one day, I will have this all figured out, or one day, I will have someone who accepts the moments I can’t seem to get out of bed, but not endorse it. I want to stop living for an eventually, so I shove present tense down my throat.
I want to know that when I do finally go out, I can outlive this body in some form, that the human population can remember me for something more than my mania, but for the vulnerable moments when I spoke out against the delusion that there is a good or bad, there is a way to live and a way to not live. I hope that the people who loved me can take away the times when I sat patiently, biting onto my lip and holding them through their own fears and awakenings, see the way I brought validation to their own neurosis. I hope they all see me as the love I tried to display and the times I stubbornly kept going when the final blinking seconds on the tile floor sounded so much safer than my own mind.

I hope I can outlive this body. I hope I can leave something that doesn’t sting. I hope that I don’t just fall into the same societal traps as the general population and that my illnesses won’t be the definition of me, I hope I can continue to exist in spite of them.