This year, I learned to name the hurricane—
Borderline, they call it.
A diagnosis sharp as a scalpel
cutting through the fog of what’s wrong with me?
For years, I hid its tremors
in the hollows of solitude,
mistook my silence for stillness—
but quiet storms still flood.
Then, you: a single struck match
in a room I’d sealed with gasoline.
Suddenly, every text left unanswered
was a funeral. Every hour’s silence
a verdict: unlovable.
My mind, a pendulum—
saint to stranger, stranger to saint—
splitting the world into halves
that never fit.
I became a cartographer of cracks,
mapping faults in your voice,
tracing tremors in emojis.
My heart? A grenade
with too many pins pulled.
Nights, I’d lie there—
chest a riot of wanting,
body numb as a fossil—
while sleep dangled itself
like a taunt.
Now, the wreckage:
I sweep shards of who I was
before the word disorder
curled like smoke in my throat.
Quiet BPD isn’t quiet—
it’s a scream smothered to silence,
a fire I starve with my own breath.
And the bear?
It perches on my shelf,
one ear frayed from clutching,
your name still clinging to its collar
like a ghost. Some days,
I mistake its shadow for forgiveness.
Most days, I call it practice—
this learning to hold what harms me
without letting it split my seams.
Survival, I’ve learned,
is not the absence of breaking,
but the art of holding fractures
and still choosing to bloom.
***
