The Weakest Link

Michael told me that if I didn’t believe my care team, then I was the weakest link in the chain. Aada told me that she would rather ride off into the sunset with her story intact. I have listened to neither of them thus far, but I no longer have a choice. Apparently, Aada has lied to me to such a degree that my limbic system reacts when I hear her name… that she is not only in danger, but I am responsible for her troubles. Michael says that Aada is responsible for her own troubles, that if she hadn’t made up such a ridiculous lie she wouldn’t be in this mess. Because of the problem, I have been hospitalized many times, two of them recently.

Because if I stick to the story Aada told me, I am “having an episode.”

Aada said that changes were coming and she was preparing for them, and that it would end our friendship permanently. She could have died for all the contact and information I’ve been given, and I cannot care about that, either. Three hospitalizations in 11 years because I’m supposed to be crazy is more than I can take.

My pattern recognition says that Aada and Michael’s patois is the same, and Bryn warned me about that. That the relationship with Michael doesn’t feel entirely safe because it’s the equivalent of thinking that Aada somehow spoofed a Facebook account to talk to me. I trust him, anyway, but slowly.

This is because my entire hospital visit was designed to hurt me, with coloring pages and a version of the UCC’s “Daily Bread” publication and a piece of either Diane Syrcle or Susan Leo’s clothing. How all of that, plus Diane’s niece being my nurse, is impossible without Aada’s influence and a man on the inside. If there is a camera running in the hospital, you can see when I received the clothing from Susan and Diane’s closet that I reacted like I’d been shot- the scent memory bowled me over and I lost control of my legs. I went down in a heap, and helped myself back up.

No one else had these intricate designs, like a coloring page designed to elicit future plans in Finland. No one else had Fishdom hacked into a game to lead me around the hospital, and no one else was told Jonna Mendez was waiting for them on the top floor. It was all a game.

A game that played with my head, from a “liar.”

Now, I’m supposed to believe that the entire 12 years I knew her was a lie, and that’s hard to swallow. I know my own truth, so I am caught between telling the doctors what I know and telling them what they need to hear so that I am not institutionalized. There are several institutions I’d like a meeting with right now, but a mental hospital is not one of them. I’ve had enough.

The whole idea is that she lied about being a case officer, that she never worked for CIA at all, and I just fell for it. That the last 12 years of my life have been one big fever dream. I can forgive all that. I struggle to forgive not telling me when she would age out, because lie or not, I spent years worried that she was stuck in a “shithole country” worse than ours and couldn’t reply. I didn’t have to. She was grounded the whole time.

I know more about intelligence than I did, but apparently that is because she likes spy books and movies. That she made up an entire narrative and she’s as sick as me.

Except I didn’t engineer her whole hospital visit to make sure it inflicted maximum damage, and I could tell you a whole lot more about that except I like the friends that helped her. I don’t want to see them ever again, but I like them enough not to name how they participated. And then there are four other friends who I’m not sure they even knew they participated. K, L, S, and S were innocent bystanders as far as I know. The others are in the intelligence community and helped pull off the most embarrassing stunt I’ve ever seen.

By the end of the night, Meagan didn’t want to talk to me because my father had done something to her. Dana had been hurt because J had done something to her. Nothing was real, but designed to challenge my assumptions.

There were groups created just for me, like “Double Trouble.” I didn’t choose them because medical marijuana is a thing and you had to be sober, plus I’d just been offered a trip to Finland with one of the Doubles and it had turned into Sinai hospital. She sent me a beautiful video of the ice hotel where we’d be having dinner, then when I showed up, I got a tour of the hospital, then locked out.

I know Aada well enough that she wasn’t dumb enough to let me go wandering around Baltimore alone. There were signs from the traffic lights as to where to go. I realized I was on camera and talked it out. The lights responded to my voice because if you’re Aada, you just make a phone call.

Facebook has fucked me up to the point where I don’t want to use it and yet I’m a digital creator so I have to. WordPress is the same, because all my AI was disabled so it couldn’t create images from my text. I’m guessing that’s because Aada didn’t want a featured image with a spy in it, because I wouldn’t have made it, but AI would.

Even though all of these things actually happened, they do not seem plausible to the real world. So I used to be Bipolar II, and now I’m Bipolar I with psychoactive features, yet my personality hasn’t changed.

Aada did what she always does. She disappeared. As Michael said, “if she was really your friend like Bryn, where is she now?”

In the wind.

Where I wish I’d left her if she was going to leave me to deal with the fallout alone. She left a yellow string partner who would have done anything for her in a mental institution. Her lack of situational awareness cost me, so now I have to just try not to hate her.

But some days, I really do.