THEO WYLDER
The List of Symptoms I Give My Psychiatrist to Beg for a Borderline Personality Disorder Diagnosis
Once I read a book where life exploded into space, spread its branches through
alien epistemology and bowled through the planets like a ripe and vicious melon.
So I exploded, too. I stuffed myself with moist banana bread and chicken fingers
dripping with sweat, skipped my mouth and shoved straight through my hips to
reach the stomach more quickly. I wanted to prove to my mother that I could be
something without her, so I used a blade to yank the skin off my thighs and
flushed it down her toilet. Feelings of emptiness—yes, I have had those too. I
paraded myself like a doll around the city and counted the hoots, the hollers,
the eyes undressing me and splaying my body against a motel room cot. One,
two, three, and then I was fine. The rust came after. I promised myself that I
was going to be a good wife, pressing cold fingers against my flushed cheeks
like a balm for unsoothed rash, and then two days later I flew in a rage down
the interstate, a tumbleweed untethered by love or forehead kisses. I turned my father
against all my friends and, in turn, my sister against my father. I daydreamed
about snapping my fingers off their roots like frigid uncooked carrots and then
plunging them into the soup—just to prove that I could. I became convinced
that there was some foreign body sequestered behind my tongue, just waiting
to take root in my brain, plotting to spin me into something hideous and green.
I smashed my hairbrush into a wall. Listen: everyone looks for excuses to martyr
themselves, but I prayed for it. I carved words into my arms. Little humiliations.
Doctor, there has to be a reason for the cruelty, for all the badness seeping like
pus from my eyes and trickling yellow and thick down my legs. There has to be
a reason for the way my calves don’t stop kicking until they are torn into small
and vengeful shards. I need something to tell the family: something they can
put in a eulogy in the absence of any truth. If there is a diagnosis for shame that
runs backwards and has its own hands, then it’s mine. If there is a diagnosis
for the narrative—the way it dooms until the end and then whistles me right back
to the beginning—then I am the textbook definition. When I had my first boyfriend, I
kissed him until my virgin lips were sore and then later made myself vomit. There
has to be something for that. There has to be something.
Theo Wylder is a young poet currently living in the American South and thinking incessantly about want. He is a student and spends most of his time writing or studying, but when he’s free, he enjoys a good Stephen King novel.