==> Heal.

It is hard to be yourself when you can’t do any of the things that define you. You are work, you are the first one into your office and the last one out, you are bullets and fighting and the steel trap of mind. Right now, you are healing. Your body gets better every day. Nothing else gets better with it, and you are locked in a constant paranoid battle with your medication. You can’t tell if your strong desire to take it has a logical base or a dependent one, it feels a shade too close to the latter sometimes, and you end up trying to readjust and entire medication schedule around that. 

They told you your eye will take longer to heal than most of you. You have to keep it clean, and your hand shakes when you sterilize the hole in your face under the bandages. That isn’t you. Your hands don’t shake for anything.

You are coffee from morning to night, a routine bagel and paper, lunch down the street with your few friends. You’ve been cooped up, but you’re torn on the subject of wanting to leave your apartment, and no one else seems to think it’s a good idea yet.

You don’t know if you’re losing yourself or changing. Either is disconcerting, and you have fallen into a pattern of talking more than usual or not at all. You’re antsy, and spend a lot of time trying to figure out why. Or to forget that you’re antsy at all. It just makes things worse, and Innovator watches you like a bomb about to go off that he doesn’t know how to diffuse. You are, you always have been, you don’t understand what’s changed to make him watch you this way. You were never safe. You were never stable. You just pretended well. He knew that.

You don’t understand what changed.