Dear friend,

I know this cannot be seen on paper, so I will write it down instead—currently, I am letting out the biggest sigh that I have in days.

I suppose the irony of this entry will be that I’m finally using you for your initial purpose: to vent about these… thoughts that plague my mind.

Everything was going so well today. And yet… and yet, it did not go well. Not from me. And I don’t know why.

…Well, in a sense, I suppose I do know. It would be false to claim otherwise, however, I simply did not see it coming.

I had planned a whole date for David to feel better, and in doing so, it seems I forgot about myself and my boundaries.

I woke him up with breakfast and flowers—it’s something I’d planned to do before he came here actually, but so much happened between then, that I suppose now was a better time to execute this plan in my mind, rather than later.

David seemed thrilled, and I was very much excited as well for the day to take its course.

I told him to be patient; I would be back soon. I passed by a convenience store with the intention of buying a few snacks for tonight. They had little chips in the shapes of fish. I recall my hand lingering on pack for a moment, before I retracted it and decided it was a distasteful joke after all.

I settled for popcorn.

The cashier was a very nice young lady—yet, I found myself dreading the exchange.

These past couple days, I repeatedly told myself it wasn’t their fault, nor mine, if they didn’t know about how I truly felt inside. I repeated these things to my brain helper (yes, I like to call my psychologist a brain helper, it makes it sound a tad less heavy and unnerving)—I was told in return that this was great. “You’re making progress, Alex, that’s wonderful!”

Truth be told, friend, I don’t feel like it’s progress at all if I’m still unable to get out of my day-to-day interactions unscathed. I know many say you should fake it until you make it, but I know that isn’t always true, for I could not fake myself out of who I really was in the end.

It is questions like these that make me wonder whether we have souls, for if I am nothing less than a brain in a prison of flesh, why am I so different?

Why can I not rewire myself like the others?

I know there are neurological explanations, and that not all brains are born equal, but I suppose I felt all these things a bit too strongly that day. Even if, to me, it wasn’t different from any other day, the shield I had put up to protect myself during that time at the airport—the restaurant, the hospital, work and now—it had a huge hole in it. And I didn’t fix it, because it was too late once I realized my armor was broken, and I wonder now, even if I did realize, would it have made a difference?

Would I have known how to mend my shield, despite not holding any knowledge whatsoever regarding its structure, size, or metals?

I don’t think so.

An elderly woman thanked me, the young lady, for holding her groceries as she crossed the road on the way back. I know she didn’t mean it either, but it was like the more I continued to walk along the path of today, the more arrows—invisible arrows—were shot at my back until I could stand no more.

Except, no one saw me fall, because this fight was between myself and me, and no matter how much pain I felt, I did not bleed.

I took the elevator.

I pressed the button that led to my floor, groceries in hand. The sound of the plastic bags shifting against each other unsettled me. It made me want to scream. It made me want to push a mute button on the world so that I did not have to hear anything, any more.

Of course, in that very moment—even if I did have a doubt—I did not think it was anything else than the plastic bags irritating me for being made of plastic.

Yes, friend, now that I write all this down, I am aware of how silly it sounds, but trust me, denial is a powerful tool that can destroy one’s life in ways you wouldn’t even imagine.

I came back home to David.

When I went to wash my hands in the bathroom, there was fog against the shower. It was then that I wondered if I should have perhaps stayed home to help David wash himself since he was still weak from last week’s events.

As I put the groceries down in the kitchen, David surprised me from behind and took me in his arms. For the first time in our relationship, I felt disgusted when he touched me. It was like I noticed every part of my body that wasn’t representative of what I felt inside being loved by him, and I hated it.

Maybe he sensed something was off, maybe he read my mind, but he didn’t linger as he usually would. And when I felt relief upon knowing he was far, that’s when I admitted to myself, finally, that something was wrong.

And then, I truly wondered if David hadn’t heard my thoughts, for he soon asked me, “What’s wrong?” The fact that he hadn’t asked me if something was wrong, but that he directly knew that something was wrong, stood out to me. “What’s wrong?” he said it again.