‘Just Keep on Pushing Her Love Over the Borderline’ with these Ten Tips

If asked to sign a waiver abdicating the WHO of responsibility for any depersonalization, ontological uncertainty, splitting, mixed mood states, dissociation, inappropriate guilt, general cheerlessness, and etc., and if the inherent wertversprechen is not having your organs liquefy into yellow slime, then sign that old John Hancock on the dotted line.

One: Stand in another line. Receive the injection. Watch as your sister receives hers. Notice her hiccupping has stopped. Recognize a second face in her old loved face. Take her hand and realize BPD is not a deficit but a surplus. Love her more than you ever have. In this love know a depth of fear you’ve never conceived possible, a fear of what could happen so soon as the evening: abandonment.

Two: Think of all the friends you once knew. The old gang. Think of how all the books and records of a lifetime could never replace an elaborate handshake developed by a gang of teenage boys. Understand all the love in a life as part of one big chain, every link corroded and breakable by any halfhearted yank.

Three: Hug your sister. Feel the lines that separate you from her blurring. Know that a part of you has been missing for nearly twenty years. Know that she’s back again. Know that she’s only back again for now. Know those old distentio animi blues, meaning time is a dimension of the soul. Ask,

“Is this a dream?” Tempt fate a time or two by snapping your fingers and saying, “Wake up. ”

Four: If urged towards the American Borderline Personality Disorder Association’s card table, politely take their brochure and pay your $75 membership fee. Provide your mailing address. If the AMBOPEDIA flak seated behind the card table is insulted by your disinterest in AMBOPEDIA’s annual ‘Boatload of Borderlines’ cruise and screams stop consonants at you so plosively that a globule of his agitated spittle enters your mouth—realize this demeanour is dictated by his affliction.

Five: If you feel empty even in the explosive presence of the AMBOPEDIA community then hug your sister as a means of clinging to your own strict identity, your own thoughts, your own feelings—all of which have grown increasingly dissolute.

Six: Recall how Catherine is “always running away from things. ” Try to push her away before she can abandon you. Grow conciliatory. Have a screaming fight. Rinse and repeat.

Seven: Grieve some more: The grief of the demon in the freezer. The grief of the freezer fry. McCain, Cavendish, etc. The grief of object cathexis. The grief of reality testing. The grief of the absent sustain. The grief of Biniodide of Mercury, which some members of the AMBOPEDIA community advocate for. The grief of sex intensified. The grief of the avoidant personality. The grief of withdrawal into all the records and books of a lifetime. Sailor Moon mornings on the chesterfield. An intergluteal cleft seen through the 6”x 6” sauna window. The grief of the clusters (A, B, C). The grief of the unstable temperament.

Seven: Miss baby Marcel_Proust, whom you have abandoned in another world.

Eight: Miss adolescence, the last time you experienced unadulterated (which is to say: unmedicated) joy.

Nine: Try to remember just who you may be: a lovelorn brother; a scared little boy; a screeching evangelical; Joe College, the frisbee expert; a man who’d curse where he came from, wherever that might have been; a lecher; a reality show star and nootropical spokesman; a colleague to Ryerson professor Klaas J. Kraay; a knight of infinite faith, yet quencher of eternal thirsts; a slo-pitch singles hitter, clean line drives up the middle; an endurer of 37 winters; a victim of the Hell’s Angels and of the Bloods, and hence a TBI sufferer and percipient of hazed cognitions; a histrionic even before the vaccine; but also a sacred executioner, and thus an agent of obfuscation; a liquefactionist waiting upon the final absorption, and so obviously a dupe: a believer.

Ten: Feel like a remnant of something past.