On Having Borderline Personality Disorder:

10 Things You Discover About Your Crazy Self

            You must meet 5 out of 9 criteria to be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder:

1.        Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in (5).

2.        A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. This is called "splitting."

3.        Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

4.        Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in (5).

5.        Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior.

6.        Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).

7.        Chronic feelings of emptiness.

8.        Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).

9.        Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

-DSM-IV

1.  People will not understand you. Or your diagnosis. If you tell a friend you have Borderline Personality Disorder, I guarantee that, if they’re not a psych major or a fellow member of the Krazy Klub, they’ll mention “Girl, Interrupted,” Jodi Arias, or that football guy. I’ve even heard, “Oh… like Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction?” And they step away from you ever-so-slowly. Hell no. Just because we have BPD does not mean we are inherently evil, future murderers, or out to get you, my pretties, and your sexy boyfriends, too! The media, medical community, and even the very researchers that have written about BPD have contributed to the negative stigma attached to the Borderline diagnosis. Most of this is fueled by misinformation. What most people don’t realize about people with BPD is that above all else, we just want to be loved, understood, and respected. We want to be happy and healthy, just like the rest of you freaks. 

2.  What feels right at first is usually wrong, wrong, wrong. Your natural reactions to stressful events tend to exacerbate the stress of that event. Borderlines often feel the most extreme version of a feeling. A fight with the bf/gf can almost instantly send you into a head-exploding rage or a major, debilitating depression – either he/she is the Anti-Christ / Torturer of You 4Ever / User & Abuser Extraordinaire, or you just destroyed the best and only relationship your sorry ass will ever have and omghowfuckingstupidareyou and you’re never going to find someone that loved you the way that he/she loved you and so you have no reason to live and maybe you should just text them and ask them to forgive you-- pleasepleasepleaseOMGyou’lldoANYTHING! It’s okay to feel extremely. It’s not okay to recklessly act on those extreme feelings. Certain therapies (CBT, DBT) are great for identifying and extinguishing chaotic, seemingly uncontrollable emotions when they arise before they cause you to use That-Professor-Who-Criticized-You’s email address to sign them up for a tentacle porn website’s email updates or tell a good friend who forgot your birthday that it’s fine, really, you knew they didn’t give a shit about you anyway. 

3.      Sometimes you’re the villain. After finding out you have BPD, it’s necessary to review your life, particularly those times when you felt wronged. Some of those “So-and-So fucked me over royally” moments from your past suddenly seem to have new meaning. The first time it happened to me, it felt like when a game-changing piece of evidence surfaced on a Law & Order episode and the whole nature of the crime had consequently changed. Except I was both the unknowing audience and the criminal the audience had never suspected.
Did my best friend actually betray me by calling the cops after I told her I was suicidally depressed in order to get her attention, or was she genuinely concerned for my life and did what she thought was best? Did my boyfriend really break up with me because he never cared about me, never loved me, and always hated me, or was it because I drove him away with my incessant accusations fueled by the fear of those accusations being true?
These new realizations about some of the most painful moments in your life can be bitter pills to swallow, but those pills are the medicine that will help you get better.

4. You have a love/hate relationship with your diagnosis. Your life has most likely been, well, hellish. Finally knowing what your role is in the insufferable pain you feel (and sometimes cause) can be a massive relief. One of the most helpful practices for improving your life after you’ve been accurately diagnosed is consistent therapy with a professional you trust and to be 100% honest with them about your life. That can be super fucking hard to do at first. Therapy flipped my whole shit upside down. I used to truly, madly, deeply believe that I was the victim in almost every situation, completely justified in taking from someone who I thought didn’t deserve what I wanted, and I felt it was normal to constantly require praise because that was how I’d learned to value myself as a human being.
After years of therapy, when I find myself daydreaming about that cute-ass bartender I’ve had a couple dates with and suddenly feel the overwhelming urge to text him a craaaazy amount of times just to reassure myself that he’s still into me and I’m still worthy of being liked, I am able to stop myself. As a teenager, that was nearly impossible. Now I can catch myself before I let the batshit-bullshit torpedo out of my brain and subsequently scare people away that I’m trying to befriend or love. Once you recognize that a thought or behavior is a manifestation of your disorder and not how you actually want to act/feel/think, it’s easier to be in get your shit together. 

5. You’ve got some extra baggage. Statistically, you’re more likely to also be an alcoholic, cutter, habitual shoplifter, gambler, pill-popper, frequent overdrafter, Adderall sniffer, reckless driver, dope-copper, or compulsive woo-hoo’er. You’re more likely to eat way too much, way too little, or be an active member of the double-finger diet club like I was for a near-decade.
Many of us are hard-wired for impulsivity; we experience intense, unbearable emotions and have—err—differently-abled “stop and go” receptors in our brains that are fucking terrible at their job, which is to remind us about things like how binge-drinking at a party where you don’t know anyone will make you feel less anxious in the short term, until you get so shit-canned that you become “That Hot Mess at that Party Last Night” and you don’t remember what you did or who you backed dat ass up on or when that humiliating Facebook photo was taken or why the hell you now have two mismatched black boots that are clearly different brands, sizes, and styles.
The most detrimental aspect of this impulsivity is that we consistently fail to remember what happens when the chase ends and we’re left feeling even lower and emptier than ever. The desire for pleasure becomes even more enthralling in this state. And so, the chase becomes cyclical and has no end. This is the biggest complication in getting better. Most Borderlines who committed suicide had a longstanding addiction they were unable to shake. Programs like AA and NA can be quite therapeutic for Borderlines because they’re so inclusive, saccharinely positive about living one day at a time, the meetings are run by a familiar set of routines, and the program itself offers a set of principles by which you can live until you get healthier and feel enough strength and conviction to develop your own. 

6.  It’s not your fault! Most folks are under the impression that “personality disorder” is just headshrinker jargon for “shitty person.” People tend to equate personality with identity. Rah, rah, rah, if the problem’s with your personality, then it must be a choice! Right? No, not really. Or at all. There are many different players in the development of BPD. Research suggests that it can be attributed to both biological factors and your shitty-ass childhood. Nature and nurture double-teamed us. And it hurts. Biologically, genetics, neurobiological factors, and irregularities in certain areas of the brain can all contribute to the development of BPD in a child. A good 65% of us with BPD have a mother or father who also has it.
Hint: It’s probably the one you both calls you and fights with you the most.
A lot of us were abused as kids. A lot of us had at least one parent who continuously shamed us for expressing emotions. A lot of us never had a stable parental figure that we could rely on to be there and not disappear. These are all things that can drive identity disturbance, fear of abandonment, emotional extremes, “splitting”, etc.

I’m not saying any of this shit is an excuse to act out, however. Just because it’s not our fault that we have this disorder does not mean we are not responsible for our actions, especially when they hurt others or ourselves. Living with BPD means having to evaluate your intentions, feelings, and actions on a regular basis until the healthy ways become the natural ways.

7.  You’re interesting and exciting to others. If there exists any kind of “upside” to the behaviors I described above, it could be that to those we meet for the first time, we often exude a mysterious passion and insatiable lust for life that both men and women find pretty alluring. Most high-functioning Borderlines I’ve met have been intelligent, artistic, and overwhelmingly charming, despite their issues. We can be some of the most entertaining people at parties. We’ve got some of the best stories because we’ve experienced some crazy shit and the attention of a crowd fuels our performance of such stories. People tend to be drawn to us, entertained by us, romanced by us. Our [American] culture has glamorized being whimsically impulsive, thrill-seeking, and acutely intuitive, e.g. the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” craze. Most artistic muses I’ve met and read about exhibit a number of Borderline traits. There’s just something arresting about our oceanic moods, lust for pleasure, and that dreamy way in which we drift with obstinacy from genre to genre, scene to scene, person to person, desperately searching for who we really are.
Tell me that isn’t romantic as hell. 

8. You’re crazy in bed. Alright, alright. This is purely a theory I have based on all the Borderlines I’ve known personally, my own experiences, and research. Maybe the old wives’ tale is true: insecure girls are just good in the sack. Why, you ask? We have an insatiable desire to please those who want to please us, we’re eerily intuitive (particularly if we grew up in scary and/or unpredictable households wherein we had to figure out how to act all the time to avoid explosive conflict), and some of us have some serious Daddy/Mommy/Authority issues, which can certainly make for, well, interesting sex. The finely-tuned Borderline intuition is an example of what I like to call a “mental illness gift” that can be used for good or evil. It’s what can make us good at manipulation, invalidation, or thought policing. But it can also be used to pick up on how your loved ones are feeling even if they’re trying to hide it, be insanely good at gift-giving, know intrinsically how to act around different people, and decipher exactly what it is that makes your lover tick sexually. 

9. Your best friend/partner is one strong motherfucker. You have both preciously loved and vehemently hated them. You’ve probably accused them of not caring about you and maybe even caused a fight based on your feelings, not fact. One particularly damaging feature of BPD is what’s called “splitting,” which is when you alternate between idealizing and devaluing a person. Way more often than not, you don’t even know you’re doing it and it can occur over anything from a full-on blowout to a perceived slight, regardless of the other person’s true intentions. For me, I tend to experience splitting with the people I care about most and have the greatest fear of losing. The intense Borderline fear of being abandoned by someone you love can drive you to both obsess over their involvement in your life and also push them away in response to perceived or anticipated rejection. My favorite BPD book is appropriately called, “I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me,” and the title, though a little cheesebally, accurately describes how splitting feels. You both love the person for the fuzzy feelings that the close relationship fosters and hate them for the equally unfuzzy and scary feelings that losing that close relationship provokes. 

10. You are also one strong motherfucker. Having BPD pretty much guarantees you a rough time in maintaining healthy, stable relationships, regulating your emotions, reacting to stress, subduing your impulsive whims, and remembering who you are and what you value at all times. It’s a hard disorder to live with. But it gets easier with the more awareness you have about yourself and the more willing you are to act in healthy ways, despite how it goes against everything that comes naturally to you. It gets better, Borderlines! And then it gets worse. But then it gets better again! And so on, until you’ve got a firm grasp on identifying the BPD parts of your personality and knowing how to use what you know to be the best person you can be. Because honestly, that’s how we’re going to successfully love someone healthily and be loved back, to give respect and be respected, to understand and be understood. As a person with Borderline Personality Disorder, I spent most of my life feeling like the weary captain of a damaged ship, trying to stay afloat in a treacherous storm. I spent years wallowing in despair about my situation instead of working to save myself from myself. If you have BPD, you’ve probably unknowingly spent your life trying to get others to save you, but this simply isn’t possible. Please remember: yes, the storm within you is raging, chaotic, and seemingly endless, but all you must do is hold on and navigate your way out of the storm. A happy, healthy life does exist beyond.

A collection of short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. I also write short humor pieces, academic essays, and novellas.

Feel free to contact me at carrielynnedavis@gmail.com.

THE FETUS

There’s a dull pain in my stomach. I sit in the waiting room of an abortion clinic, chewing my fingernails to bloody stubs. My mother is to my right. We're not talking. It’s not because I went to a party under the influence of a bottle of Robitussin, and was then raped by Garrett, the drunken big-gummed vice president of the Cribbage Club at my high school and now I have to have an abortion. It’s because she has heartburn from her hazelnut iced coffee, and I feel anxious and uncomfortably pregnant. Up until this moment the fetus has been a mere tumor, the cause of my dry heaves in the morning and relentless constipation, but now I can’t help thinking of it as some sort of little version of me, trapped inside of my womb, happy and completely oblivious to its miserable future, which I imagine involves burning in an incinerator, or perhaps being eaten by stray dogs out of a trash can.

However, I argue, if this fetus is some sort of “little me,” I am indisputably saving it from years of pain. I imagine it, like me, eleven years-old, rummaging through the pantry for a bottle of sleeping pills after a hard day at school. Danny Bouyea does not like-like me back, and I’m crushed. Worse than being crushed, I am embarrassed. My face is red, and his friends heard my confession. They all tee-hee at me, and I decide that I will show them all! Really, I will. They’ll sure feel guilty when they hear from our teacher that I’m dead the next day. This will be the first time the fetus will try to take its own life, and it will not be the last.

This place looks just like any other doctor’s office. Earlier, I had envisioned a kind of seedy, dingy shithole with rickety chairs occupied by the utter filth of humanity—ratty-haired girls with smudged lipstick, regulars of the clinic I’d guess, sitting here and waiting to get the embryos vacuumed out of their ragged wombs so they can go back out and fuck their boyfriends again, end up here--their whole lives a cycle of in-penis-out-fetus, and though I am certainly pro-choice and consider myself, you know, one of those raging lefty liberals, there is something about this vision that leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

It’s not dingy in here at all. On the contrary, it’s bright as all hell. The lights are intense and unforgiving; there are a shit-ton of accent lamps on the tables in between the green pleather chairs (the ones that fart when you move), ghastly fluorescents overhead, and standing lamps by the doors. I look around for a magazine, but for some terrible reason, the only thing within reach is an old issue of American Baby.

“Isobel?”
I start panicking when the nurse leads me away. Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ, God Almighty. I envision a slew of horrors. I see the huge vacuum hose being shoved up inside of my body. I see the doctor, all yellow-eyed and hungover, accidentally hitting some red button somewhere that says MAXIMUM SPEED!!! and the vacuum going mechanical apeshit, sucking out all my bones and organs, leaving me in a puddle of my own membranes, like rolled-out Playdoh, a fleshy mess of frowning skin.
I am okay.

I am okay.

I am okay.

I am not okay. I’m trembling!-- enveloped in a womb of terror until everything is black and quiet and I feel nothing at all.

When I wake up, my mouth is dry and tastes like corpse. It feels as if my body’s full of a substance that wasn’t there before. Congested. Full. Bloated. Ugh. My vision’s blurred and the only thing I can see is a big ass to my left, bent over and filling out paper forms at a desk near the bed I'm on. The nurse, I guess. Her hair's all askew and her ass is cartoonishly bulbous. Each cheek could be a pregnant belly. Amazing. The fat-ass nurse pays no attention until I try to sit up, but jerk back down because of the pain.
I groan, “Fucking Jesus,” and Fat-Ass is startled. She tells me that I came to earlier than expected. She shakes her fat ass out of the room, maybe to get the doctor. She doesn't tell me anything. It's fine, really; it's not like I just had a living thing sucked out of my nether regions or anything. I roll my eyes and notice that on the nearby table there’s a yellow biohazard bag with what I imagine to be the dead Fetus curled inside. My eyes are fixed on it. I have an overwhelming, uncontrollable desire to see it. I must. Yes, yes. I don’t even think about it, in a second, I’m sliding off the bed and I’m on my feet, tip-toeing over to the table to take a tiny peek inside. The Fetus looks weird as hell. It reminds me of a shrimp covered in cocktail sauce. But it’s kind of cute.

I do not want this Fetus to be burned or eaten by dogs. It looks so sad and adorable, and I’m filled with a feeling that is foreign to me. It’s overwhelming--like a little storm raging in my head and my stomach gets tighter and tighter and I feel dizzy and it’s hard to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I start to cry and I want nothing more in the universe than to have this Fetus. I want to keep it. It’s mine, isn’t it? I think that I would be a much better mother to a Fetus than an actual human being that would grow up bitter and hate me, hate the world, hate herself. She’d have 'the Depression', like me, and probably end up killing herself.

I wrap the Fetus up in its bag and gently place it in my purse, which is slung over the chair beside the bed I’d been sleeping on. I feel nervous that the nurse will question me about the missing Fetus, but Fat-Ass never returns. Instead a man in a white coat opens the door holding a file folder and closes it when he sees me standing up. His face has been taken over by a large jolly mustache. The Mustache says, “Whoa there!” and pats the air down with his hands, telling me to sit down. So I sit on the bed and I pretend to listen, nodding a few times, while he talks to me like I’m a child—softly and slowly, sure to give every multi-syllable word a thorough pronouncing. He’s got one of those assuring voices they use in commercials for anti-depressants.

“Now, ah, we’ll want to see you again in a week,” he says, with a furry smile, “so that we can make sure you’re, ah, doing well…” he smiles again. His eyes get all squinty when he smiles.

“We’ll, ah, want to know if you’re experiencing any, ah, pain.” Smile.

“But it shouldn’t be anything worse than, ah, an uncomfortable menstruation.” Smile.

The Mustache blabs on and on and I start daydreaming about the Fetus. When I leave the room and walk down the hallway, she’s still in my purse, sleeping her soft dead sleep. I open the waiting room door to my smiling mother, who gives me an enthusiastic thumbs-up with both hands.

At home, my mother barrels into the apartment ahead of me and retreats into her room to burn incense and ponder the meaning of life. I decide to store the Fetus in the freezer temporarily until I can come up with a suitable place for her. When I try to accomplish this discreetly, creeping into the kitchen from the doorway, I’m confronted by my little brother, Adam, and this is how he learns what a Fetus is:

“I will kill you, Dragon Eater!”

He stops then and looks inquisitively at the yellow biohazard bag in my hands.
“What’s that?” he says, a little face under a bush of brown curls.
“It is a bag,” I tell him.
“What’s in it?” he asks.
“A fetus.”
“What’s a fetus?”
“A fetus is like a baby, but it’s not.”
“Like a baby?”
“Well, hmm,” I pause a moment, “Let me show you.”
I walk with the little guy back to the Playskool canvas in the middle of his bedroom clutter, and unfold a new piece of paper. With a pencil, I draw a fetus, but it looks more like some sort of merry bulbous worm. Instead of feet it’s got more of a tail that curls up into its body, like this:

“This is a fetus?” he giggles.
“Yes.” I tell him.
I leave him looking quizzically at the fetus drawing, and I go to the kitchen and peek in the direction of my mother’s room; inside, she’s sprawled out on the bed, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. I open the freezer and place the biohazard bag inside a frosted box of two year-old old chicken fingers.

I think about the Fetus incessantly over the next few weeks. I’ve been drawing little cartoon fetuses all over my notebooks and financial aid applications for college. The Fetus chills in the freezer all this time. I’m terrified of putting her in a jar with liquid because I imagine that in a month, or maybe even a few weeks, she’ll deteriorate into the liquid and I’ll have a horrifying jar of Fetus Soup on my hands. This cripples me with fear, so I decide to tell my mother about this and ask her what I should do.
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon when I hold this conversation. Adam has just bounced off the elementary school bus without his backpack because he’s lost it again. My sister, Tonya, sits in front of her Myspace page, scrolling through pictures of herself and holding an empty Cool Whip container filled with a meat and cheese concoction. My mother sits cross-legged at the window-bench in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke spirals out the window while watching the neighbors argue in the driveway below.
“Darlene’s hooking,” she says apprehensively. “I know it.”
I tell her this is ridiculous.
“I’ve seen her standing on the street in the early mornings,” she replies, blowing a smoke ring.
I roll my eyes and sit at the kitchen table. “She’s like three hundred pounds, c’mon.”
Below, Darlene’s wiggling her bulbous arm, telling her ex-boyfriend to talk to The Hand.
“So what? Men are pigs,” says my mother. I just shrug.
We sit in silence for a few moments until I cough and tell her I’ve, um, kept the aborted Fetus. Her eyes bulge in surprise and she turns to me slowly, dropping the cigarette into her ashtray. She asks me if I’m kidding. I tell her I’m not.

“Well, my God! Where the Hell is it?”
I look at the freezer and point.
“Oh Jesus Christ, Isobel, in the freezer? With the food?” she says, crinkling her nose and grabbing her cigarette with her fingers, tapping the ash.
I wasn’t sure what to do with it, I tell her, I wanted to preserve it but I didn’t know how.
She thinks for a moment and eyes me suspiciously. “Why did you keep it?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” I say. She waits for me to go on.

I tell her that in the moment, I couldn’t not take it! Something made me. I had no control. I felt guilty and I just walked over to it and took it. It was almost unconscious.

She seems to accept this and rolls her eyes. Tonya comes thumping into the kitchen with her empty Cool Whip bowl, triumphant. My mother says to her, all wide-eyed and excited, “Your sister kept the aborted fetus, it’s in the freezer!”

Tonya looks at me in disgust.
“That’s grody, dude.”
“I don’t care what you think,” I scowl at her, “I’m keeping it.”
This is hilarious to my mother. She’s in hysterics, giggling wildly. My cheeks redden and I regret telling her. I’m silent until my mother settles down and continues puffing her cigarette deeply. Tonya leaves and gives us the look that means she’s busy increasing the brightness and contrast on her Myspace pictures, and she’d better not be disturbed. She slams the door behind her. My mother and I look at each other in silence.

Her head perks up.

“Shellac!”

*

I have serious doubts about the shellac, but after a few days I buy it anyway. Soon my mother and I are sitting at the kitchen table with cigarettes in our mouths, concentrating on painting the little Fetus with shellac, using Adam’s rainbow paintbrushes. I’m careful to bring the Fetus into my bedroom and onto my dresser, but after a week’s observance, I notice that the shellac seems to be making things worse. She’s starting to raisin and I fear that she might waste away. She’s just going to have to be submerged in liquid, like in science-fiction movies, and it’s not until a late afternoon in the living room that I have the answer. I’m sitting on top of a few empty TV dinner boxes and reading a book about fetal care when Tonya turns around from the computer and clears her throat at me.

“I was thinking about that thing on your dresser,” she says.

“The Fetus?” I look up.

“Yeah,” she rolls her eyes, “It’s technically a dead person, right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t really call it a person, really, more of an embryo—an almost-person,” I explain.

“Yeah okay. Well, what if you put it in that stuff that morticians pump into dead people?”

“Hmm,” I close my book, “You mean formaldehyde?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she shrugs and turns around back to her web page of self-portraits.

How stupid of me. I hadn’t thought of formaldehyde. It’s perfect!

Tonya and I sit side-by-side at the computer browsing Ebay for formaldehyde. After duking it out with chemqueen69 and winning at a bid of sixty dollars for a gallon of formaldehyde, I keep the Fetus in the freezer for the two weeks until it arrives in the mail, along with an acceptance letter to a liberal arts college. I’m glowing.

I find a jar of pickles on the refrigerator door. It’s so moldy that the pickles have congealed to a lumpy green jelly. I wash it out, and this is now the Fetus’s home. She floats around in the jar happily and I think that, for a moment, I detect a smile on her little underdeveloped lips.

*

College is near. My room has become the world’s smallest warehouse, with boxes piled so high I can’t even reach them anymore. I want to bring everything to New York, leave nothing behind. Besides, Tonya’s already laid her claim to my bedroom and casually informed me that everything must go, and what is left behind will find its way to the curb. I’m careful to roll up my fetus watercolors very gently, tuck the stuffed fetus I’ve sewn into a bag of its own, and leave just enough room in the car for my senior year art project, a five-foot fetus made of crinkled papers, paint, and duct tape, nailed to a seven-foot cross I made in Shop class.

My mother is unhappy about driving me to college. I know this because, with her coffee in the morning, she takes two Xanax and the ashtray is already full of squished cigarette butts. She also asks me several times if there are any other modes of transportation I can take to get to central New York. I remind her each time, no. There are not.

In the car she smokes, listens to Christian talk radio, and cackles.

“These people!” she exclaims, her cigarette bobbing up and down, “They’re crazy!”

The drive is nine hours too long for just the two of us. When we arrive at Ithaca College, my mother drops me off with my boxes and gives me the peace sign as she drives away, back home to Maine.

*

My roommate hates me. Her name is Tiffany and she likes Dave Matthews Band and I don’t. I reside on the left side of the room. Every millimeter of the wall is covered in fetusy artwork. The five-foot fetus nailed to the seven-foot cross hangs over my bed like a shrine. The Fetus jar sits on my nightstand, next to my reading glasses. On her side of the wall there is a poster of the holy Dave Matthews and a picture of her white-bread mom and dad at her high school graduation. I offer to help decorate her side of the room and she scoffs at me and declines. The next day I’m locked out of the room so I have to ask Residential Life to let me in, and when they break the lock open, Tiffany is Skyping with her boyfriend a couple feet from the door. She says she’s sorry, she didn’t hear me knocking.

We will probably not be friends, I gather. She blow-dries her hair in the early mornings when I’m sleeping, so I make sure that the Fetus is, at all times, facing Tiffany. She tells me it’s disgusting and I’m perverse.

I tell her that I’m bored with the concept of her.

When Tiffany is not around, I paint watercolors of her being killed in ways that amuse me. Tiffany is attacked by a ravenous bear on the campus quad. Tiffany is rolled into a blunt and smoked by Snoop Dogg and his homies. Tiffany is crushed under a steamroller driven by the Fetus. I enjoy painting very much. It gives me inspiration. I like it particularly because I’ve started to fall into the Depression, and I have made only one friend in college. Her name is Courtney Keach and she’s an art major who has a single dorm room covered in ashes and empty beer cans. I don’t often visit her room because it smells like death. This is because she paints portraits of women using her own blood and feces.

“I find this very strange,” I tell her as she smears blood over a painted-woman’s exposed nipple.

“Yeah, well, you’re not the poster girl for normalcy yourself there, Fetus,” she says with a Camel between her yellowing teeth, “Besides, that’s all life is—shit and blood!”

I like Courtney because she tells me that she just can’t be bothered with the rest of the dullards on campus, and I’ve been feeling more and more disconnected, myself. I’ve taken up chain-smoking Marlboros between classes. Courtney and I will sit on the roof of the art building and shit-talk about the campus bros and biddies. We moon the football players. On the weekends, we drink red wine from the discount liquor store because we’re classy. After a bottle, we’ll sometimes prank-call our relatives back home. We call Tonya.

“Hullo?” Click, click, click, in the background. I can tell she’s at the computer looking at pictures of herself.

“Cunt-bucket!” screams Courtney into the phone. She laughs. Then we hang up and call back. Sometimes we get my mother.

Ring, ring, ring.

“Yes?”

“Jiggly tits!”

“Ah yes, the wonders of the bosom,” says my mother in a stoned whisper, “Caller, please tell me, have you ever considered the amalgamation of the sexes? A super-sex, if you will, with bosoms and a penis, and all that—a race of hermaphrodites. I do think that it will be only then when we will achieve true liberation from sexual oppression…”

We hang up before she finishes and laugh until our stomachs ache.

*

Lately I feel sad all the time. It's halfway through the first semester and I've acquired a job at the campus Information Desk, but I am a bad employee because sometimes people will ask me simple questions on the phone that I should be able to answer, but instead I’ll start crying and ask them questions of my own.

“Have you ever considered that our lives have a negative value? Do you think that we, as human beings, are weak creatures, operating under will, which inevitably entails misery?”

No one ever has any answers for me.

I’ve also developed a taste for strange foods and I’ve stopped eating at the dining halls completely. Sandwiches and diet sodas and mashed potatoes are bullshit, I decide; instead I find myself sampling my watercolor palette and eating Tiffany’s mail by ripping the letters first into pieces and having them with milk, like cereal. I know this isn’t particularly normal, but I’m compelled to do this. When I eat dining hall food I feel like a dullard. Tiffany finally catches me eating a postcard from her grandmother. The Greetings of Greetings from Florida! sticks out of my mouth. She rats on me to the director of Residential Life, who refers me to the counseling center.

“Pick any seat you’d like,” the counselor tells me.

Her name is Susie and her office is very zen. On the small table next to the cushy armchairs there is one of those little trickle fountains and a box of tissues. I want to eat one but I think better of it. She gives me a paper assessment and the questions are hilarious.

6. Have you ever thought about ending your life?: Fuck yes!

7. Have you ever attempted suicide?: What do YOU think? 

She asks me to talk about my childhood, so I do. I tell her about the sad-sack stuff, you know, blah blah blah--my parents getting divorced, the near-abortion of Adam, being an obese child, getting picked on, being sad all the time, and all that. I tell her about Garrett, The Big-Gummed Rapist, and the abortion. Yadda, yadda. She's consistently zen until I talk about the Fetus in a jar. Then she stirs uncomfortably, and I start to feel anxious. Oh God, oh God, oh God. The sweats and the shakes and the shudders. I tell her I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My head's in my hands and I try not to cry, but I do. She tells me that I have the Depression and I have to find healthier ways to cope with my stress. In addition, she says, I can join a support group for my Depression that is free, courtesy of the college.

Oh, fun.

*

This is what I do: I stop going to classes and I move to a single room not far from Courtney’s in the Towers residence hall, because Tiffany says she’s had enough of my psycho-bitch bullshit. My room is high up, on the eighth floor. In the mornings I roll joints and imagine tearing out the screen and falling until I hug the pavement with my body. There's nothing more motivating than the image of a brainy soup splatter and a pile of broken bones. There must be at least four floors to guarantee death. I hope I’d land on my head and die instantly, but I have terrible luck, and I fear that I’d just end up brain-dead or paralyzed. I imagine the rest of my life wearing a frilly bib to catch my drooping spittle, wheeled around a facility by the bitter working class who dread going to work and changing my shitty diaper. I do not want this.

The support group is a circle of six sour faces, all waiting for their turn to complain. I despise all of them except for a writing major who oddly resembles Charles Bukowski, terrible face and all. His real name is Frank and he’s there because he has a mean father who did mean things to him when he was a child. He rolls his ugly eyes when the whiny blonde talks about her break-ups. I find this attractive. After the first session, we end up fucking in his dorm room. Aside from the rape in high school, this is my first sexual encounter. I try to like it, but I don’t. He fucks the way he looks like he’d fuck: hard, fast, and without mercy or consideration. Later, I scan his bookshelf to discover that he’s not into Bukowski or Ginsberg or any poet at all, really. He reads Dan Brown and Stephen King. I feel cheated. I sulk out of his room, sore and considerably more Depressed.

After a few months of the routine class-therapy-work-studying, I stop drinking paint water but it's still hard to get out of bed. I have fetal nightmares, where the jar on my nightstand breaks and the Fetus is RIPSHIT, wiggling her way up to my bed and eating my brains while I'm nestled in a stoned oblivion. Sometimes I call my house to hear my little brother’s voice and then I hang up. At night I sit on the grassy quad with Courtney, and we talk about the nature of death.

“It can’t be any worse than this shit-hole!” she spits.

I ask her, “What if it is worse?”

She considers this.

“Nah.”

During winter recess, I take a 14-hour long Greyhound ride, back to my family. My bedroom has, as promised, become Tonya’s room and all of my remaining artwork has vanished. We roll joints on her high school history book and play Uno. Since I left, my brother’s been inspired by my fetus drawing and has taken to drawing fetuses of his own. He draws them on the wall of the Storage Room and paints them green. When I ask him why the fetuses are green, he says it’s because they’re moldy--duh! He’s hung my original in a frame over his bed.

I sleep on the couch because Tonya’s taken the mattresses from her old room and consolidated with my mattresses. Now she has a giant bed, and I have none. But it’s okay. I only feel annoyed when, in the middle of the night, I slip my hand under the pillow and my fingers smear some sort of pasty surprise. When I turn the light on, I see that it's an old dinner plate caked with rotting spaghetti. The Fetus in a jar sleeps on the floor next to the couch where I reside until my mother sees it and sneers.

“Good God, you still have that awful thing?”

I frown at her, hugging the jar close. I keep it hidden for the rest of the break, and when I return to school, the Fetus has her eyes open. They’re milky-looking and underdeveloped. They’re kind of spooky, really. I show Courtney and she’s impressed.

“Holy Hell!” she says.

“I know.”

“What the crap! It didn’t have its eyes open before?”

“No, it didn’t,” I reply.

We look at the Fetus for the rest of the night while drinking forties, musing about the formation of its eyes. We draw no conclusions that coexist with reality as we understand it, so I go to sleep feeling uneasy for the next few nights. It only gets worse when the Fetus starts talking to me.

“You look better without all that eyeliner,” she tells me in the morning, and I drop the black pencil on my dresser, feeling self-conscious. I’m suspicious about this. I invite Courtney to my room because I want to determine if she can hear the Fetus as well, but she doesn’t. It’s just me.

I contemplate telling Susie about this new development, but I think better of it because so far the Fetus hasn’t really said anything terribly disturbing. On the contrary, really, she's been sort of complimenting me and reassuring me. I enjoy our conversations. When I call my mother and she’s stoned off her ass, I want to throw my cell phone against the wall and break it into a thousand teeny tiny pieces, then jump out of my window or hang myself by my own intestines, but the Fetus blinks her milky eyes and sighs softly.

“Don’t worry,” she says, in a voice like my own, “There is nothing you can do to change her behavior. You can only focus on your own. Make yourself happy, Isobel. Watch a movie. Go for a walk. Remember that I love you very much.”

“You’re right,” I nod, and then I watch Look Who’s Talking.

This is another thing that’s interesting about our exchanges: the Fetus tells me that she loves me quite regularly. Sometimes this makes me feel uncomfortable. Should I say that I love her back? Do I love her? We’ve spent quite a bit of time together. It could only be natural to develop a bond stronger than owner-object. Have I grown an affection for the Fetus that I’ve been unaware of until confronted with its own feelings for me?

“I love you too, Fetus,” I say finally, and the Fetus blinks her eyes and smiles.

*

The school year’s almost over. I’ve been having these little moments where I feel like I’m frozen in time. It happens in class often. I’ll be drawing fetuses in my notebook and suddenly I’ll be in the midst of a panic. When I look up, no one is talking and I’m flooded with racing thoughts. I’ve wasted so much time here. I’ve screwed everything up. I’m a fuck-up. A loser. An asshole. No one will ever love me. I’m ugly. I’m pathetic. I’m stupid. Socially-inept. Morally-corrupt. What have I been doing all this time? This whole year’s gone by, and what’ve I accomplished? Nothing. Zero. I’m worthless. Utterly, completely, entirely worthless. I’m a bad person. A bad, bad person, and I deserve to die.

I’ll try to take deep breaths to keep from crying hysterically in public, and then time resumes as if nothing has happened, and I’m left feeling as if a storm has just ripped through the room and I’m the only one who’s been caught inside. I’m on edge all the time. I’m apprehensive and I’ve begun to truly start hating my peers. They’re dullards—all of ‘em! I can’t relate to them and they sure as hell can’t relate to me. I wouldn’t even want them to; I have nothing to say to them. I even stop talking to Courtney. I stop seeing Susie because I’m suspicious of her motives, certain that her bias, whatever it may be, pollutes her counseling and further undermines my well-being. The only being who can make me feel anything at all lately is the Fetus, who has started sprouting hair and is growing significantly larger. Her body's all mushed inside and her head’s poking out. Sometimes she turns her head so she can watch me if I’m not in her view. This would scare me, normally, but I’m preoccupied with my mind-storms and the little artistic projects I’ve been working on, like writing haiku on other people’s doors in my own blood, which I’ve been collecting in a small jar by cutting my wrists open and letting it drip slowly. It’s a tedious process and consumes most of my time.

I’ve stopped sleeping. Instead, I stay up and have slumber parties with the Fetus. She watches me paint my chewed-up fingernails. I throw popcorn at her when she makes a corny joke. We talk about things I’m too embarrassed to talk about with other people, and the little Fetus is always kind and honest. I ask her what it’s like to die, and she tells me that it’s sad and scary, but it’s okay, because it’s the last time I’ll ever be sad or scared again.

*

I look like a corpse now. I walk around campus like the living dead. My eyes are black and crawling back into my head. My hands are grey and tired. My limbs seem withered. I start wondering if I really am dead, so I cut myself deeper and in more places just to make sure. I use the extra blood I’m producing to write longer poems on the walls.

“Your poetry is wonderful,” the Fetus tells me, “but I do wish you wouldn’t hurt yourself like that.”

“I’m creating art,” I grumble. I can’t be bothered.

“You should really go back to your counselor,” she says sadly, “I think you might be in danger.”

“I’m not in danger, Fetus,” I say with a paintbrush in between my teeth.

“How can you be certain?” she peeks her head out of the jar.

“Because. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I face her.

“It would appear to me, Isobel,” she lifts herself out of the jar and sits on the night stand, “that you may not know what you are talking about anymore.”

I consider this.

My hands are covered in blood and I feel suddenly overwhelmed with confusion. The Fetus and I look more and more alike than I’ve ever noticed. I stop what I’m doing and look into her sad little eyes with my own sad little eyes.

“Do you think I’ve gone crazy?” I ask.

The Fetus says nothing. I start to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she offers, and touches my hair with her tiny hand.

“I’m sorry, too,” I shake, “What should I do?”

The Fetus wobbles when she tries to stand, and when she does, she pushes the jar of formaldehyde towards me and jumps onto the carpet by my feet.

I take the jar in my hands and I look at the teary-eyed Fetus.

“You will have to drink it very fast, because your body will reject it,” she says between sniffles, “I am terribly sorry it had to be this way, but I don’t want you to feel pain anymore.”

Those watery eyes get round and her body expands before me. The baby hairs on the top of her head grow long and brown like my own, her belly stretches out, and the little nubs on her hands and feet develop into fingers and toes. She unbends her body and rises from the carpet, a little version of me, more and more identical by the second.

I try to think about my future but I can’t. There is nothing. It’s like trying to imagine a color you’ve never seen before. There is nothing ahead of me. No pages left.

“What’s going to happen?” I ask her.

“I will take good care of your life,” she says softly as I sit on the carpet and lift the jar, “I promise.”

I have been waiting for this for a long time, I suppose. I'm sad and scared. I curl into a fetal position next to the wall and watch the Fetus nod at me. I swallow and swallow and swallow and there's a sharp pain in my stomach, pregnant with poison. The Fetus asks me what I see, and I want to tell her, but I'm gasping and choking. The formaldehyde burns and burns and burns. I want to tell her that I see nothing. Nothing at all, while I waste away. But it's not true. The last thing I see is the smiling Fetus and I smile back. 
I'll never feel sad or scared again.

COPYRIGHT 2010 CARRIE-LYNNE DAVIS 

Liberating the Sheeple, Chapter One

JESUS SAVES

Emmeline Reiner’s last cigarette drooped from her pursed lips as she sat in the square nook of the open window from her dumpy third-floor apartment. She was in a right foul mood. Someone had been nicking cigarettes off her, she knew it. Her fingers probed the empty belly of the pack, as if one were hidden somewhere in the creases of the cardboard. She’d have to go out today.

What a pisser.

Below, an old woman stood on the corner sidewalk, holding a sign that read: JESUS SAVES. Emmeline rolled her eyes. Jesus saves what? Money by switching to Geico?

Although it was a hot mid-August morning, the old woman wore a raggedy winter coat and a kerchief around her head, as if it would save the pathetic fluff of hair she had left from the humidity. Emmeline pulled the last drag of her cigarette and tossed it out the window into the tiny patch of grass in front of the apartment. She went to close the window but stopped upon seeing a Ford pick-up slow to a halt beside the old woman on the corner.

The driver was a no-good kinda guy from the looks of him. He wore a greasy mullet and sunglasses. He hurled a Big Gulp at the old woman. Then he gunned it down the street. Emmeline squinted, making out the figure of the old woman behind the billowing dust from the pick-up.

When the air cleared, there she was, standing on the corner like a stop sign, drenched in red soda. She was still holding her sign, which looked suddenly eerie, with little red rivers flowing off its edges, imbuing the background with stains the color of watery blood. Poor old bat. She might’ve been ignorant but she sure as hell didn’t deserve to be Big Gulped. Emmeline coughed. The old woman turned her head toward the window, narrowing her sad little eyes.

Emmeline shut the window with a bang and pulled down the shade. Some people in this world. Some people made no sense.

In the kitchen she poured a day-old coffee from the pot and eyed the calendar on the front door. What day was it? She peered. Wednesday. Oh, hell. That meant work. She moseyed into the living room to find her teenage daughters slumped in darkness, like gargoyles, hunched behind glowing screens. Isobel, the elder, more embittered spawn, chugged from a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, her puffy face illuminated by the multi-colored lines of scrolling text from a chat room on the computer screen. Genevieve, the obedient, more tolerable of the two, read from the Bible in front of the TV. A talk show played behind the screen. The host unfolded a notecard and shook his head. After a dramatic pause, he shouted maniacally, “You are NOT the father!”

On stage, a frazzled, twenty-something  leapt from her chair and began wailing into her hands. The would-be father made fist-pumps. The audience members did ‘the wave’. 

“Bullshit!” cackled Emmeline, startling Genevieve from her reading.

“Do you ever find out who the father is in these damned shows?”

Genevieve shrugged.

Isobel swiveled around in her computer chair and said, “Who the fuck cares?” with a mouthful of chips.

“Does it matter?”

¿

Lewiston, Maine was a grim little city. The folks from the greener parts of Maine started calling it ‘the Dirty Lew’ some years back. Emmeline supposed this came from how unhappy people were around these parts. Nobody smiled. Nobody laughed. Nobody whistled in the streets. In the summers, children ran around pretending to shoot each other. Hassled mothers slouched languidly out their windows, rolled cigarettes in their wrinkled fingers, maybe two or three hard drinks deep. Among the wilted apartments, the downtown was littered with the empty storefronts of failed Ma and Pa shops, all boarded up and stickered with For Sale signs. Leaving the apartment meant passing through this failure.

Emmeline sighed and threw herself out of her apartment and into her rickety Toyota. She peered out of the driveway. The old stained woman was gone.

¿

 

Nestled within the confines of an old, vacant Ames department store was Great Falls Sales. This was where Emmeline worked part-time for cigarettes and rent money. The job itself was pretty monotonous. Two days a week, she sat there for a good six hours straight, calling old cranks who never had the money to buy what she was trying to sell. This month’s special product was called Memorall, a supplement that increased one’s memory. Despite sitting through a grueling two-hour training session on the product, Emmeline was still not quite sure how it worked. Luckily, she read from a script. They all did. Everything was scripted at Great Falls, even the answers to questions people asked.

The inside of Great Falls was a dreary labyrinth of cubicles with computers and most of downtown Lewiston’s working population attached to headsets, many of them yelling into their microphones at the hard of hearing. Emmeline slumped through the maze to find an empty cubicle, audible pieces of the script bouncing on and off the walls, creating a tornado of noisy sales pitches that swirled into the metallic rafters. She found her seat and logged into the computer, already craving a cigarette. Sprouting from the top of her cubicle’s back wall was a mass of grey curls. A raspy voice croaked from beyond.

“No ma’am! CRED-IT CHECK! CRED-IT. CREDIT!”

The grey curls bobbed up and down. Susie.

“YES, WE WILL CHECK YOUR CREDIT.”

According to Emmeline, Susie was the most tolerable co-worker. She, like many of the older folks, absolutely dreaded technology, could only type with one finger, and shared an intrinsic resentment for supervisors half her age. Emmeline coughed.  Susie looked up, nodding a hello.

“It’s not free, ma’am. The ad says it’s RISK free.”

Susie made a gun with her fingers and shot herself in the head.

When Emmeline put on her headset, someone tapped her on the shoulder. It was Kenny, her twenty-two year old supervisor, flamboyant and relentlessly animated about everything. Kenny looked like the type of guy in advertisements for cell phones, so comparatively clean-cut that you wondered why he was working there. His voice was high and had a jangle to it, as if he was always whining.

“Hiiiiii, Emmeline. How’s it going?” he sat at the empty chair next to her cubicle and tilted his head toward her, as if they were girlfriends.

“It’s another day,” she said.

“You’re up for a performance review today.”

Emmeline stiffened. This was bad news.

“Can you follow me?”

            Kenny escorted her to a back room. Inside, the walls were grey and windowless. There was a table and two metal chairs, one of which was occupied by a man in a suit that she wasn’t quite sure if she recognized. He motioned for Emmeline to take the adjacent seat. Its metal feet screeched against the cement floor as she pulled the chair back.

            “Emmeline Reiner, yes?”

            To Emmeline’s horror, she realized there was gum in her mouth. She swallowed it down with a nod.

            “You understand the importance of the scripts we use here, don’t you, Ms. Reiner?”

            Emmeline sighed.

“Of course. It’s just that people don’t want to be talking to a robot, you know?”

“But they’re not talking to a robot, are they, Ms. Reiner? They’re talking to a human being. They’re talking to you.”

“That’s all well and fine. I understand. It’s just that sometimes people think they’re talking to a recording and get frustrated with me. I’d be frustrated, too.”

The man scribbled something illegible on a pad of paper.

“You see,” he folded his hands, “There are legal reasons why we must read from the script and only the script. I have no doubt that you can find ways to be personable while still adhering to the script we provide. It is your job, after all.”

He smiled, baring small square teeth so bleached that they shone like diamonds. The sense of finality in his voice suggested that Emmeline’s job relied on her compliance.

“I understand,” she said, defeated.

“Great. No more slip-ups, okay? This will be considered a formal warning. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.”

The man shook her hand with firm, icy fingers.

            When she returned to her cubicle, Susie spun around and around in her chair. Emmeline put on her headset and began dialing numbers.

            “Hello?”

            “Yes, hello, is this Mr. Robert Greco?”

            “Eh, who’s askin’?” he coughed into the receiver.

            Emmeline’s eyes glazed over, the script blurring on the screen ahead.

            “My name is Emmeline. I’m a representative for Memorall—”

            Click.

            This went on for hours. In the break room, management had arranged a basket full of free Memorall samples. After a much-needed cigarette, Emmeline stuffed a bunch of them into her pocket. Back at her cubicle, Susie was doing the Macarena and yelling into her headset.

            “Yes Ma’am! That’s thirty-nine ninety-nine. No, thirty-nine. THURR-TEE NINE.”

            Emmeline ripped open a Memorall sample and tossed the supplement down her throat. It left a bitter taste.