The Darlings: Mark Is a Psychopath (Flash Fiction, Process)

I am what you might call a psychiatric hypochondriac. It's not a real term.

You know what is real? You know how sometimes, when you're depressed, you wish you had thyroid cancer, or some awful virus, to explain how tired you are, how your back hurts for no freaking reason, how you feel pissy like a girl, how you keep getting fatter and slower, and losing concentration, and you feel stupider and sometimes in class they ask you a question and nothing comes out of your mouth? “I have cancer,” you wish you could say. It'd be a great excuse for when you just want to sleep all the time and never open your eyes again.

But that's f'd up, so I don't think those thoughts. Often. Instead I read my mother's old textbooks, from when she still lived with us, before she decided it'd be better for her mental health not to have a man. Or a kid. I think, and I think the books think, that I am depressed. That I got antisocial personality disorder. I don't know for sure. I'm not a doctor, and I'm not eighteen, and you cannot have ASPD before you're 18. Only thing I know for sure I don't have is bipolar disorder. Never had spikes of energy like that. Wish I did.

Or maybe there's nothing wrong with me, and I'm just a terrible person thinking terrible things.

So that's why I'm a psychiatric hypochondriac: the only thing wrong with me is I think there's something wrong with me.

Excerpt from the upcoming story anthology about the Guardians. This is The Mark, and his origin story. It's one of the Darlings I had to cut. If I can't find another place to fit it in, I thought at least I'd leave it here.