Yesterday was an okay kind of day, some good stuff, some difficult. I’m home now at the end of it and I’m fragile. I’ve been doing a lot of things lately that asked a lot of bravery of me and perhaps I’ve misjudged somewhere. My head is full of parts who are screaming and I’m massively dissociative and in the early stages of a possible psychosis. I’m deliberately cultivating the dissociation in the hopes that will be protective against the psychosis. It’s a really weird feeling to go from being fine, to that sudden sense of being on very thin ice, where a wrong move will tumble me down a rabbit hole that’s cold, dark, lonely, and populated with nightmares.

I can feel my hands fraying into the night. There’s screaming under the water, and a shrill kind of silence that’s like pressure in my ears. And then, in the next moment, we switch, and there’s breath in my throat again and nothing seems more ridiculous than the suggestion that we’re in any kind of trouble. Breathing in and out and watching the night go from peaceful to terrifying. Not looking at the starless sky. I take three steps back inside my own skin. I pull the ash of the zombie years over my skin, use it to weigh me down so the wind cannot blow me away. I withdraw my consciousness from my hands. These are not my hands, not my fingers, these hives on my wrist are not mine. I am a candle deep inside a lantern of skin.

No crying now, just the little eye roll of the unperturbed. Someone who has to stay up all night with a sick child or creature. Someone stolid, who settles in with a book and a cup of coco, who has brought a blanket to wrap in against the cold, to do what must be done without trauma or exasperation. Tomorrow is another day, it’s another day.