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THE MORE SHE TOLD HERSELF NOT TO CRY, the more she did, and Aunt Meg certainly wasn't happy about that. She couldn't help it. She missed her mom and her dad and her brother no matter how much wrongdoing they'd all been the subject of. And plus, she'd got her first monthly the day before. Aunt Meg had yet to explain what the hell was going on and why she was having to stick cotton into her underwear.
"For God's sake! What is it now, Romilda!?" She burst angrily after barging into her niece's room without warning. She'd heard sniffling from the other side of the door when passing by with a basket of laundry, "Have you been taking your pills?" There was a beat of silence when Romy's breath caught inside her throat, "Why haven't you been taking your meds!? They make you better, Romy!"
My medicine, she thought. She imagined the cut coloured casing that she swallowed every morning and night. Her whole motivation of taking her medicine so sporadically was because her hallucinations had made her feel like she was reaching a dark place again. She breathed. But the others had been hallucinating too — so was her BPD really that awful? Was it really changing her everyday life, or was it all trapped inside her head like an endless pong game between the sides of ill and not ill.
"I don't need to be better! Crying doesn't mean I'm sick. It means I miss my lunatic mother and my crazy father and my psychotic brother!" She screamed, and her throat reacted sorely. "I'm not sick! I'm fine!"
"You sound just like Diana! You sound like your mother!"
"Because she is my mother. You are not my mother, and you will never be my mother."
"Do you know why Ted and I fell out of love, those years ago? Do you know what happened? I was pregnant with a baby, but it wasn't his, oh no it wasn't," she laughed hysterically, "It was my baby because your mother was so fucked up in her own mind to have another child! And you know what baby? It had black hair and big hazel eyes. That baby was you, Romy. You."
She sat motionless, watching her aunt with a kind of puzzled horror. Her first instinct was not to believe any of it. She thought perhaps she'd imagined the whole thing. Perhaps, if she acted as though she hadn't heard her, she would find that none of it had ever happened. Meg stormed away, slamming the door behind her. After that, she was left alone, in the dark with her thoughts. It hurt like getting her ears pierced. A pinch, a sting, and then heat, searing into her head on a constant loop. Somehow, she eventually slept.
She'd cried herself dry, and in the morning, she even felt better than before. She dressed herself, lined her eyes with a thin black pencil, and then fixed her fringe in the mirror by flicking it around with her fingers. She felt sucked dry, drained, but ... better, in a sense. Not good, but relieved.
