autobiographical

May: Mental Health Awareness Month

Trigger Warning: I describe mental illness and suicidal ideation as well as suicide and suicide attempts. A link to a variety of resources is provided.

Normally, my website is a place for my poetry or my fiction, but after a conversation with a colleague last week, I felt a renewed sense of why I advocate for mental health and talk about how important it is to reach out if you are struggling.

My co-worker talked about how his nephew committed suicide, and I personally have lost a few friends to suicide as well, but their stories are not mine to tell. However, I can tell you about the aftermath. The hole that the loss of their lives ripped through my heart.

I, too, have tried to kill myself, whether it was from an overdose of pills or because of a psychotic-fuelled nightmarish episode where I ran into traffic in a fit of a hallucination.

I know there is a lot of stigma surrounding mental illness, but I am now willing to be vulnerable about my bipolar and my complex posttraumatic stress disorder. If by being honest about these illnesses can help save lives, I’d share my story as many times as it takes.

Of course it’s scary to share it, but what’s scarier are those who are dying undiagnosed or living with mental illness, struggling each day.

If I can do anything to ease your pain, know I would do it. I am just one person, but I am one person who cares.

Please reach out to a person you trust if you need support or if you can’t find anyone, try the list I have here if you’re feeling suicidal.

But please don’t wait until you feel that hopeless. Get help soon. People do love you and care about you. We want you here and we want the demons to be silenced, too, but there’s a way to silence them without ending your beautiful life.

The world needs you in it.

Isabelle Palerma

Unmoored: a Poem

A prompt from Maureen Thorson.

“Write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.”

A date etched into my heart as though
carved into glass.
My eyes were stained with tears, and
I turned to a notebook,
searching for answers about
why God robbed the world of ordinary men
who did their best to love.
I bled ink onto the page as I struggled
for truth
the night no one remembered as
a young lost princess became unmoored.

Isabelle Palerma

Insomnia: a Poem

Unable to sleep,
I think of the funerals I did not attend,
the lovers whose names I have since
forgotten,
colognes which once reduced me
to ash,
and now I lie awake, still,
in this carousel of grief.

My body a war zone, my mind
a racuous storm –
I pick up a paintbrush,
I turn to my typewriter.

I begin to write your name
(in calligraphy)
because logophilia runs in my veins
and ink is in my blood.

Isabelle Palerma

Unlike You: a Poem

“Unlike you . . .” a prompt from Kay A.

In less than a month,
unlike you to care about the wreckage of the Titanic that is my heart.
I have witnessed you stampede on
and trample me barefoot.
Yet,
the teeth you bared is what
I have come to expect.

Family taught me
(for better or worse)
to murder with mercy.
When you were flashing your baby teeth,
sharpening like knives,
I was practicing my smiles
in polished glass.

Unlike you to offer condolences
or express empathy,
and yet, the past few days,
while Lazarus has been in the tomb,
a different side of you has been exposed.

Unlike you to show warmth,
still a reptilian cold underneath,
but the air is a bit milder now – less frost,
less chill.

Unlike you to offer benevolence and yet,
a crack of a smile,
a beginnings of generosity.

Is it possible you were murdered by my mercy?
Killed by my kindness?

Or did New Year’s resolutions just fall
a few days behind on this calendar?

I’m not one to gaze the gift horse
in the mouth,
but I do have my suspicions
when you were flashing those fangs,
honing them like knives,
and are now sweet as spun sugar.

Just call me Doubting Thomas
if your kindness only lasts as long as
Lazarus was in the tomb.

Isabelle Palerma

The Scent of Loss

The sky is the black of a bruised plum with a cobweb of stars scattered across it. The air no longer smells of stale cigarette smoke nor does it smell of his pungent cologne. It was a cologne kept in a green glass bottle on a high shelf that you sometimes uncorked to marvel at the power of its scent.

The air is empty. It smells of dry, autumnal leaves, and there is a chill. It makes you wish you were at a bonfire or anywhere but here. You are curled up on a reclining chair, wearing your favorite sweatshirt. Inside, there is no fire roaring in the fireplace like usual on a Friday night.

There is no fresh homemade bread baking in the oven. All the grown-ups are outside. Your mother’s eyes are bloodshot from crying. Even your father’s eyes are red-rimmed.

The moment is dark and heavy.

It as though they have forgotten you curled up in your favorite chair. You slip out the garage door past the knot of adults. You plop onto a gigantic geode that sits in the rock garden in the front yard, its many facets shine in the silver of the moon. As you inhale the air, you smell other fires in other people’s fireplaces.

You think of bonfires and candy apples and of Halloween. Halloween is only eight days away. You think of your costume still in its bag slung over your chair in the bedroom. You begin to hate Halloween. The red pencil you are writing with is the only sound as it scratches against the bone-white paper.

You tell yourself you will never forget this feeling, this moment. He is gone, and the world as you know it ceases to exist.

Darkness closes around you, but you do not cry. Though you are only eleven, you are aware of the darkness inside and outside of you. The air is empty.

The night is cold, and you are alone.