Prologue: Before I Knew What It Was Called
She always warned people about herself.
Not to scare them off. Just so they knew what they were walking into.
She had borderline personality disorder. Which meant, in the simplest way she knew how to say it, that she felt everything. Not the way other people felt things. Not at the volume other people felt things. She felt everything at over a thousand times the strength of the average person. Every emotion. Every shift in a room. Every silence that lasted a second too long. A thousand times. More, sometimes. Always more.
Before she knew that’s what it was called, there were other names for it. The names weren’t hers. They were handed to her, pressed into her slowly over years by people who didn’t understand what they were looking at.Too sensitive. Too much.The words found their way so deep into her that she stopped questioning whether they were true. They felt true. They felt like the only explanation for why existing was so exhausting when everyone around her seemed to do it without bleeding.
She was not too sensitive. She was not too much.
She was just never explained correctly to anyone. Including herself.
This is her trying to fix that.
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She felt everything before it happened. Not in a way that protected her - in a way that just let her watch it come. Like standing in a doorway watching the sky go dark, knowing the rain was coming, knowing it didn’t matter if it was a soft sprinkle or something loud enough to break things. It came anyway. It always came. And knowing it was coming did nothing to make it hurt less when it did.
That was what existing felt like for her. On a good day.
Tired. Full and empty at the same time. Numb in the way that only someone who had felt too much for too long gets numb - not because the feeling stops, but because there’s nothing left to react with. An empty shell still catching everything.
She was usually fun to be around. She meant that. She was sweet and warm and she would love you like nobody had ever loved you before if you let her. But she had a short fuse. She spiraled. She got triggered by things that seemed small from the outside and were catastrophic from the inside and she couldn’t always explain the difference fast enough before the damage was done. That was the part that scared people. That was the part that had scared her too, before she had a word for it.
The word didn’t fix anything. It just gave the thing a name.
And named things are somehow harder to ignore.
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This is the story of the last six months.
This is the story of a boy who told her he understood.
This is the story of everything she gave him so that he could.
And this is the story of what he did with it.
