Hot Tea

To my husband:

The hot tea is sitting on my nightstand. It always tastes better when you make it. You know just how I like it: Yorkshire tea, milk, and two Splendas. There is something very comforting in that fact. That you always know what I need before I need it. How you can see the signs and you do everything in your power to help.

I’m a train barreling off the tracks. You’re the conductor trying to salvage the trip.

I know I’m not easy to live with. God, do I know that! No one has ever been able to do it. Well, my dad, of course. He seems to have been the only one in my life to understand me without understanding it at all. Then you came along.

I warned you from the beginning. I gave you every escape possible. Hell, I even pushed you to the limits time and time again. I tried to get rid of you. I tried to make you understand that I didn’t want anyone else to live with my in my darkness. In the complexity that is my mind, through all the dark passageways where fear lives and crazy resides, there’s no room for anyone else.

I’m so overwhelmed with real life, the things that are real, that when my anxiety goes off the charts and my mind starts wandering to places that don’t even exist, my body takes the brunt of my mind’s madness. My stomach starts to turn. The physical pain becomes unbearable. I can’t leave the bed. I can’t breathe. You sit the tea by my bed. You make me food to ease my nausea. You try to tell me over and over again that it will be okay. But, will it?

Will it ever be okay to be so consumed by what might be that you miss out on what is? Is it ever okay to yell and scream and push away the one person that is doing his best night and day to help you navigate a forest full of imagined wolves, waiting to pounce at every turn? Wolves he can’t even see, can’t even understand. They’re out to get me. And you fight them, blind.

I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want to be so consumed with things that aren’t there. A bomb that will kill my youngest son. A disease that will take my oldest. A car accident that will leave me a widow.

Then, there are the things that are there: bills, elderly parents, your ADHD, our kids, our businesses. And I worry about them too. But, you take it all on. Without hesitation. You take me on with no reservation.

What keeps you here? What keeps you picking up the pieces again and again. Pieces that cut your fingers. Pieces that are so askew and broken that you don’t even know how to put them back together. Paper thin pieces with razor-sharp edges. A jigsaw puzzle with no way to finish it. That’s my life every day. And you walk in with me. Hand in hand.

You tell me it’s my passion for everything. I do nothing halfway. In my black and white world, it’s all or nothing. When I love, I love without boundaries. My love, like my darkness, is a never ending well.

You say it’s my creativity. I can pour my heart out on the page. I can come up with clever quips at the drop of the hat. I make you laugh. No one looks at things the way I do.

I don’t give a damn about what people think of me. Never have, never will. I walk to the beat of my own drummer, even if he has no rhythm.

I’m spontaneous. You never know what you’re going to get with me around.

And there lies the rub.

You knew what you were going to get, yet every day is a new challenge.

I want to thank you somehow. I know I am more than a handful. I know my anxiety is foreign to you. My BPD, alien. My depression, an unseen shadow hanging over our heads. But, every single freaking day you fight with me. You fight demons you can’t see. Demons that aren’t yours. And again and again, you are my lifeline. You are that pinpoint of light that somehow is immune to the darkness, flickering in the storm.

And somehow, day after day, you’re still here. Still loving the unloveable. Juggling the real and imagined with expert perfection. And putting the hot tea by my bedside, just the way I like it.