I don't live in the middle.
I live in the swing.
The whiplash.
The pull-your-heart-out-then-pretend-you're-fine kind of living.
I want closeness—
no, I need it—
I need someone's presence to feel like gravity.
But the second it shows up,
my body hits the emergency exit like,
Nope. Not safe. Too familiar.
That's what nobody tells you about borderline.
It's not mood swings.
It's survival reflexes
still firing
in a life that already changed.
There is no grey area.
There is only
falling in love with the moment
and hating it five minutes later
because safety feels suspicious
when you were raised by chaos.
I keep saying,
"It's just emotions. It'll pass."
I repeat it like scripture.
Like CPR.
But my chest tightens anyway.
My hands shake anyway.
My breath stutters like it forgot the rhythm of being alive.
And next thing I know—
I'm not a grown woman.
I am a small girl again.
A girl who learned
how to read moods faster than books.
A girl who learned
how to stay quiet so nothing gets worse.
A girl who learned
love with conditions,
touch with consequences,
and attention with a price tag.
You see, I can give unconditional love.
I can bleed softness into everyone I meet.
But when it comes back to me?
I flinch.
Because part of me still believes
that if someone really sees me,
they'll find the reason everyone else left.
So I try to build a self.
New hobbies.
New goals.
New versions of "maybe this is who I am now."
I stack identities like coping mechanisms.
But the emptiness doesn't care how productive I look.
It sits in my chest
like a room I never learned how to decorate.
And just when I start to feel steady—
just when I think,
Maybe I'm getting better—
life presses one old bruise
and my whole nervous system remembers the map.
Back to shaking.
Back to hiding.
Back to wanting to disappear without actually wanting to die.
Let me be clear.
I don't want to vanish.
I just want the pain to stop having a microphone.
I don't want isolation.
I want rest without hypervigilance.
I don't want numbness.
I want quiet that doesn't feel like abandonment.
I don't need fixing.
I need space to exist without constantly proving
that I deserve to be loved gently.
And maybe I won't escape the little girl inside me.
Maybe she's not the problem.
Maybe she's the reason I'm still here.
So instead of trying to kill the pain,
I'm learning something slower.
Something braver.
I'm learning how to sit with the chaos
without letting it name me.
I'm learning how to hold the girl I was
and the person I'm becoming
in the same shaking hands—
even if there is no grey area yet.
Even if all I have today
is breath,
and a body
that refuses to give up on me.