stalked (jenlisa)

chapter twenty-eight

Everything changes one day whilst Jennie and I are out in town. For weeks Jennie had still been distant, giving me reassurance with her words whilst her actions suggested something else. I kept telling myself she just needed time, that eventually she would go back to normal.

It was the only thing keeping me going because anything I was doing wasn't good enough, so I had no choice but to leave it in the hands of time. Surely, enough time would pass and Jennie would heal and forgive me.

If she had no intentions of forgiving me, then why would she stay? If she believed we could get through this then I had to too.

Lately, we were only ever together when we were at home, and even then Jennie seemed miles away. There was a constant urge, a prickle at the back of my neck, a voice screaming inside my head, to approach her, to hold her tight and not let her go, or worse, to demand answers and kill her if they weren't what I wanted to hear, but I knew better. The voice in my head had brought me nothing but misery. I was learning to tune it out, or at the very least, ignore it.

Weak. Coward!

It would constantly scream at me.

She's gonna leave you. She doesn't love you anymore. She's gonna kill us. She can't be trusted. She's not Jennie. Our Jennie was fake. This is an imposter.

Always trying to pit me against Jennie. Sometimes switching between wanting to kill her and wanting to smother her with love. Living in fear and distrust of her whilst trying to convince me to do the same.

Sometimes I caught myself responding to it out loud. I hadn't done that in years. I would always listen and regularly converse with it inside my head, but not out loud.

I agreed with it when it told me to hurt Jennie and it agreed with me when I wanted to move past the deceit after the punishment, but it seems I'm the only one with the patience to deal with the aftermath of what we did.

Auditory hallucination. It was a symptom of my psychosis episode which occurred years ago that was triggered by my alleged bipolar disorder which I was diagnosed with at the young age of twelve. They had said many things; borderline personality, ASPD (which is just the nice way of saying sociopath or psychopathy), psychosis (that didn't come until a little later), and paraphrenia. In all honesty, I don't think the doctors knew what was wrong with me either, so they just wrote down bipolar, which in a way, categorised most of my symptoms.

I was supposed to go back the next month for a more thorough psychological evaluation, but I had already run away from that god-forsaken orphanage within the week.

I don't remember much of how I felt back then when I was diagnosed. I think I changed after the psychosis, but I didn't think I had bipolar. I never experienced extreme episodes of high or low moods, except when I killed someone and when met Jennie. Meeting her was the highest I've ever been, it all came crumbling down when I discovered the truth.

During my psychosis, I heard a lot more voices. Sometimes they took control over me. They would call my name using my voice whilst I was trapped inside my head with all the other voices, unable to do anything about it. Most psychosis episodes can last from days up to a few months. Mine lasted six. But one voice never went away.

Although, I did read that a psychosis episode that extended beyond six months usually results in a schizophrenia diagnosis. And since not all of the symptoms of my episode never did cease, I guess that meant I had schizophrenia.

It didn't mean much to me so it didn't matter. I could function wholly with it, and without a diagnosis or treatment. For the most part. I was prescribed some pills to help with my mood when I was a child; I never completed the prescription. I liked me better how I was.