I need you

I thought I’d turned a corner yesterday. Maybe I had, but today I’m back in the abyss. I cannot survive without seeing K all these months. I don’t want to survive. I’d finally reached a place where all the parts trusted her and felt safe with her, where we had begun to take for granted that we would see her every Monday, where we trusted that she wouldn’t go away and didn’t want to leave us, and now this f*cking virus is keeping us apart.

I honestly want to die. I can’t see how this is going to get better. I don’t want to think about how a world after this pandemic could look because it could be one in which weekly therapy isn’t a thing and there is no way I am ready to lose her yet, on the back of this change that has been so abrupt and so all-consuming. The sense of permanency I had begun to trust was only ever an illusion though – it has been ripped away in a way I never expected, years before I expected society as we knew it to end.

K and I did a phone session today. I have big stuff going on because I’ve heard through my sister that my disabled brother is really, really struggling with isolation and the loss of his routine. I don’t see him because he lives with my mum but I love him so much and my heart is breaking for him. K and I talked about this a lot and I know she gets it, knows this is a long-running story, knows how complex and gut-wrenchingly sad it is. My family is a broken mess and a global pandemic shows up all the cracks and things that can never be mended. ‘I just want to see you’ I wailed and as she said ‘I know’ I could feel her holding me in all this. But it doesn’t change the fact that for 4 and a half years when things have been this bad I have been able to see her, every week and more, whatever I’ve needed. And now I can’t reach her.

She says we’ll review the support, that I might need more, things might change in a month and I need more support – ‘A MONTH!!!’ I wanted to scream. The truth is it will be so much longer than that. It is unsurvivable.

Young parts are screaming and wailing. I cannot hold them. I’ve cried all afternoon. I’ve run out of space to cut on my thighs and I think about cutting my arms, which I’ve not done since before I was pregnant. I don’t know how to get through this. I’m scared of the distance that could grow between K and I. Young parts aren’t getting what they need from her but worse is if they give up and disappear. That’s always when things get very bad for them, when they go quiet. I’m scared of needing K like this the whole time we must be apart but I’m just as scared of stopping needing her, of cutting off and my brain wiping her away so I can’t remember her at all. I’m scared my brain will erase all memory of her, like it has before, and that without seeing her I’ll never find my way back to her.

I don’t know how to do this and I wish I did.