LoquaciousFox

My mother read this in the 1980s and can't remember the title or the author.

Basically a sci-fi novel where, per post title, a bus of people is driven through a cloud, which turns out to be composed of souls, some people die, some are taken over by the souls.

Apologies for not having more details, I'm hoping the somewhat unique scenario might ring a bell with someone.

TIA

I picked up the wrong laundry detergent.

It was the simplest mistake. Resulting in such complicated feelings.

I put the wash on practically on autopilot and now my entire house smells of you.

The you that you used to be to me, before you let the mask slip, to show me who you really are. The you I really believed loved me back.

It's such a strong fragrance. I used to catch a whiff of it off my fingertips after I simply held you, fully clothed, in the beginning.

That's the real rub here. This isn't a scent I can associate with our downfall. The smell of stale cigarettes and booze and sweat. The bitter, acrid memory of hurt.

This. This is the clean, manufactured scent of effort. Of trying

I was talking about dreams with someone the other night. Lucid dreaming. You can do whatever you want. I said that sometimes, I realise I'm dreaming and the first thing I do is fly.

You were in my dream last night. You looked well. Younger. Your hair was darker. So were your eyes, for some reason. You were dressed oddly formally.

It went as you might expect. My hair fell into my eyes and you brushed it away and leaned in to kiss me. It felt so real. I don't think you'd ever taken the initiative like that in real life. I'd always done the leaning.

I allowed it to happen. I could feel your mouth, your tongue. The heat. I wanted you.

(Even for such an idealised version of you, even in my dr

It's something we talk a fair bit about here and, while I wasn't at all familiar with the term and it's true meaning at the start of the relationship, it was something I noticed just at the edges of my awareness pretty early on.

So, like many of us, I would've made some vague references to them mirroring my phrases or quirks, picking up on my interests and definitely working hard to mirror me sexually but...

I was searching the media of a GC with friends, and ran across a few gifs of myself that I'd made to amuse these friends. Meaningless and I'd forgotten all about them, so I tapped on them to see what I was up to.

I was alarmed to see my ex reflected in my facial expressions. _I actu

About two weeks ago I posted I was struggling because my undiagnosed ex seemed to be doing so much better with and for their new supply.

We've been LC for a couple of months now, it's been just about tolerable, but Friday night the texts were flying, and I was boggled. It didn't seem like any sort of conventional hoover: it mainly focussed on how they wanted some sort of good, happy friendship back between us like we used to have before we hooked up.

Yesterday it was revealed their new supply had kicked them out.

I won't lie, Loved Ones, I was elated. It felt like vindication. Validation. Release. All that good shit. I don't even care how bitter that sounds. I am still bitter. I'm hurt

This weekend I hung out with a friend who's also a mutual friend with my ex. We actually spend a lot of time together so it's not usually a problem but this weekend my ex came up as a topic of conversation.

Friend wanted to check in with how I was doing, they know I've been having a rough time in other areas and that basically it's been a rough year.

Unfortunately that also meant my ex came up, and I heard a couple of things I wish I hadn't.

Seeing as my ex is not diagnosed, I don't bring up my suspicions with most people, particularly not someone who cares for both of us. So when Friend talks about them, it's like trying to talk about a non-disordered person and I actually find it jar

So glad this sub exists, I'm new and this is my first post. I'm struggling badly right now.

This is going to be long.

We've been together nearly 20 years, we're both close to 40. I've stood by them through addiction, recovery, sobriety, bereavement, and a whole host of issues alongside the depression.

Their issues all stem from an emotionally and verbally abusive, manipulative, narcissist tyrant of a parent, and even though my partner is nearly 40, the parent's impact is as deeply felt as ever.

Some weeks ago their mental health reached crisis point and I wound up calling an ambulance because they'd taken an overdose.

Some weeks prior to that, I'd tried flagging with them that I could

I tried doing a search but in a sub such a this, terms like "depressing", "miserable" etc come up fairly frequently so apologies if I'm asking something that's kind of a common post.

We often talk a lot about the mask slipping a certain amount of time into your relationship/friendship with a pwBPD, and for me, I always sort of inadvertently framed that as "the mask slipped and they showed their rage", "the mask slipped and I saw they were lying and cheating". (For myself it was when they first lost the plot and raged at me over a phrase of mine that they misinterpreted, when I was genuinely trying to help them from a place of love and support.)

But really when it came to my ex, their m

...is there are so many text posts floating around, apparently listing examples of what gaslighting sounds like but utterly lacking in explanation or nuance.

Anyone else noticed this?

A particularly flippant Instagram text post ("Gaslighting Sounds Like") can list such things as:

• I never said that
• I didn't do that
• you twist things
• you're so sensitive

...and yet I said all of these things to my ex when they were splitting me black.

No wonder it was so easy for them to turn it back on me.

I stand by every word: they were hypersensitive, often to the point of ludicrous, they rewrote history constantly with a combination of word salad and flat out lies, and they certainly t