The explosion is inevitable. The only question is, how close will I be to the blast?

In February, you call me after eight months with a life update. I start Googling.

Google: schizophrenia
Google: schizophrenia treatment
Google: can people with schizophrenia live a normal life

My therapist tells me I should look into support groups, something like Al-Anon.

I imagine sitting in a circle of metal folding chairs in a church basement. Cold coffee. Stale donuts. 

“Hi, my name’s ———, and my ex-boyfriend is schizophrenic.”

You’d left nearly a year before. Your undoing of our consensual reality followed by indifference, followed by silence, followed by bewilderment, followed by pain, followed by forgetting, and then remembering it all again.

In March, I meet you at a coffee shop. You run your hand across my leg.

You never apologize for the fallout. I never ask where you went.

In April, we walk through the woods. You ask if I see the man in the trees. There’s nothing there.

Google: confirm or deny hallucinations?
Google: how to love someone with schizophrenia properly

My friends tell me to run while my legs are still working. 

In May, I pull my fingers through your hair and take with me a fistful of curls.

Lamictal, you say.

In June, you spend the nights in the bathroom, vomiting.

Latuda.

Google: long term side effects of anti-psychotics

You insist that you did not mean to drag me into this. That you hadn’t crashed through the threshold with the intention of revealing your diagnosis. I am not sure that I believe you, but I am sure that I understand.

We cling to our last comforts. We cling, and we grasp, and we hold on tight, and we hope that the comfort clings, and grasps, and holds back onto us.

How close will I be to the blast?

Picking pieces of shrapnel from my skin, or full dismemberment?

My mother says that choosing to love you is a life-long sentence.

You wrote me a poem a few months after I’d gotten out of treatment. Before the silence. Before you went to the hospital the first time, and the second, you wrote, “maybe we don’t have to rewire every synapse in our brains.”

But maybe we do. Maybe it’s the only way.

Google: how to perform brain surgery

You’ve been getting a lot of tattoos lately. Too many, I think. So many shapes and symbols and numbers and words etched into your body that it makes me wonder how much longer you plan on having one.

Google: schizophrenia life expectancy

I wonder what will happen first. Will your brain melt, or will your body burst?

In August, I move to New York. You call, even though we agreed you wouldn’t. 

Google: boundary setting

Google: how to break up with your ex-boyfriend without sending him into psychosis

In November, you punch cigarettes out on your skin. The psychiatrists want to put you on the third floor of the hospital again.

Google: plane tickets to Columbus

The night before Thanksgiving, we lay in your bed.

Your scars have always been a part of you. Crisscrossing lines of raised tissue stretching from your elbow to your wrist. 

I graze them gently, careful not to linger, conscious not to show fear.

You tell me you’re thinking of going off your meds. You say that you need to prove your insanity to yourself.

I imagine shopping for a black dress.