Trigger Warning:This poem contains dark themes and is intended for audiences who can handle these themes. If you are experiencing symptoms of depression or suicidal thoughts, please see a mental health professional or refer to my list found here.
Before you ask, yes, I am feeling sad and hopeless, and I do have a lack of pleasure in doing things I previously enjoyed — like writing poetry or talking to my imaginary friends.
& yes, I’m aware how it makes me sound when I say “talking to my imaginary friends” but I’m an author and a poet, I play with words for fun.
This isn’t fun for me. These wellness checks. These inventories on my feelings: check “yes” or “no”, rate your feelings on a scale.
Most days, I’d rather paint you a watercolor of my emotions, let the feelings wash together until you can’t tell ecstatic bliss from despondency.
But today, before you ask, words are falling apart, they’re fragile ghosts who haunt me but don’t seem to speak my language.
Before you ask, the poet in me doesn’t want to waste the paper. She thinks it’s better used for a brilliant mathematician cycling through his numbers or a census-taker calculating persons than to listen to her trivial whining.
Yet here I go.
Before you ask, yes, I suppose it’s natural to plan these things. To work out the logistics of life and to perhaps even plot out the details of death. But I’m not Sylvia Plath, contemplating the temperature to set my oven, nor am I going to the ocean with stones weighing down my pockets.
I have too many plans. Too many things to do. I would have too many goodbyes to say. Too many books to donate. I still have unfinished stories burning in me. Before you ask, the light in my eyes flickers and yes, even dulls, but though the disease tries to steal me, as I go through these inventory questions, I discover I’m not ready to leave
Write a story based on a line from a movie. (June 28, 2025,Out of the Box Prompt.)
“The worst part is I’m starting to forget. I have to constantly make myself remember her. Every day.” (Ricardo Morales from “The Secret in their Eyes”.)
Still frame from the film “The Secret in their Eyes”.
How can you forget the person you love? How can I have looked you in the eye morning after morning, kissed you good night and now, your name is all but a cypher. A code I cannot break. Everything I do, and yet I cannot conjure up the memories of you as I once did.
You are my love. In my notepad – the one where I jot my most important information into – I write your name over and over until it looks like a meaningless scribble, scrawled letters without any context.
I’m too young for this forgetting disease. But they told me it’s not the brain plaque like some folks get. It’s something different, and, of course, the doctors have explained it to me in a thousand different ways. Each time, I think I understand and I write it down, but when I try to read it later, none of it makes sense.
I curl my hand into a fist and slam it onto my desk. It’s frustrating. I feel like a child, or worse, a lab rat.
Telling myself I’ll remember makes no difference. I always end up forgetting. Your name is just empty syllables. Even when I say it, it is ash in my mouth.
I want to curse, but all the words are the same. I curl my hand into a fist and slam it onto my desk. When I look into a mirror, I scarcely recognize the woman I have become. When I pass you in the hall, you are a stranger. Weeping, I beg you to remind me who you are, who we were.
So, you do.
You don’t just say our names, but you tell the history of us. The way you kiss me like the very act of kissing would braid our souls together. You tell me how though you always loved me, you never married me.
At this, I feel my brows furrow.
You explain, “I never wanted to steal your wild. You were a flower I did not want to pluck from the earth.”
I feel myself smile. I feel myself soften.
I wish I could let go because even in forgetting, I still find pieces of you I remember.
Often, you take me into your arms and dance with me, whisper about the scent of the seasons. Spring – honeysuckle. Summer – fresh vanilla. Fall – cinnamon and bon fires. Winter – impending snow storms. You say my scent is your favorite.
That I smell of autumn. I am a woman of cinnamon sticks and bon fires.
But I do not know why. I never wear perfume.
Yet you breathe me in as though I will save you. I begin to forget you.
One day, I struggle for breath. It’s hard to remember. These basic tasks. This remembering.
I gasp. The breath is fleeting. The memories are going, too. I want to say goodbye, good night, but I can’t even remember the breathing.
Eleven years is a long time. You’ll forgive me, won’t you, my love?
We watched the sun rise like a film strip from a movie, drinking Darjeeling tea, every morning. Every moment felt like magic. Her hair, like cinnamon and bon fires. Her skin left me breathless. Enchanted.
We whispered our secrets into the bottom of the kettle and into the shape of each other’s ears, like forming mists and watching them drift away. One morning, after telling my sins, I knotted her a dandelion ring, the only promise I ever knotted her. I asked forever.
Her eyes glittered with tears as she accepted.
It wasn’t marriage, but it was love. I thought when I said forever, I’d wake up with wrinkles etched in our faces. Eleven years is a long time.
She’s been gone, and graves are unyielding, unforgiving. The worst part is I’m starting to forget. I have to constantly make myself remember her.
Every day.
Yet she was the one with the forgetting disease.
My mind is slowing, wading through the molasses-pain of grief, yet the anguish is thick and blurs the details. I wish I could remember, but maybe forgetting is safer. Numbness is safe. There’s a reason surgeons anaesthetize.
But I pull out our photo books. I find the videos I made and listen to her voice. Her lilting accent like a song. Her eyes haunt me, begging me love, love, love, even in memories I scarcely remember.
Forgetting feels safer.
Was she always crying out for help? Was she always begging me for answers?
I wish I could let go because even in forgetting, I still find pieces of her I remember.
Isabelle Palerma
This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.
For National Short Story Month (like last year), I’m experimenting with writing more short stories.
The prompt from Dylan Drakes’ randomizer is an affectionate yet reckless street performer having to prove her innocence in a dark fantasy/sci-fi mind transfer short story.
Features: dark, potentially triggering imagery.
The way the rain came down wasn’t good for business. Nobody has got time for buskers when it’s pouring down rain. They’re busy shielding themselves from the tears from the sky, and it’s so damn loud. I wish I could just blame the noise on the howl of the wind, the tip-tap of rain on awnings, but it’s all those thoughts.
People’s thoughts get louder – and sadder – on rainy days. Folks wanting to jump from bridges. Take too many pills. It’s enough to break your heart. I’d switch places with them if they’d let me. Bury me six feet under instead.
I never cared about something as petty as my life. But the rain falls fast. Their thoughts loud. And I want to mother them. Protect them from the darkness in their minds.
So, one by one, I guided them out of the rain, out of the city, to a tent. The circus. Where there are clowns and a ringmaster and fire breathers and elephants. Tigers doing tricks. Fortune tellers with crystal balls.
One called me “selfish” as I led the people with the loud thoughts to the circus. “Self-centered” like an accusation. And it stung me like a wasp sting.
“You’re not as sweet as you seem,” a performer hissed.
An eyebrow arched, I had a million questions. I must have allowed him into my mind and vice versa because the words continued there.
Prove this is altruistic, he demanded, prove you’re not doing this just to quiet the streets. To silence your mind.
I wanted a little peace, it was true. Their thoughts interrupted my ability to play my violin. But I genuinely cared. I wanted what was best. Tell me you are innocent. That this is for the people and not for you, Clare.
His wheedling stuck with me. He wasn’t wrong. I was selfish. I always have been. Taking them to the circus wasn’t just charity. It was to quiet my mind. To still the streets. To leave behind the voices.
And yet, one persistent, reckless voice remained, telling me the streets would be so much quieter without a busker, a violinist, named Clare.
I never cared about something as petty as my life. But the rain falls fast. My thoughts loud.
Isabelle Palerma
This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.
Housed within my ribs is a metronome that on a good day, glistens like a cluster of amethyst, but most days, it burns like an arsonist’s proudest achievement.
It is an anatomical feature I thought I disposed of when sitting on fire escapes, waiting for lovers to save me from the clutches of my own sins & sorrows.
But she wrapped some grass around my obituary and smoked it. The vapors felt like my soul parting from my body, but you did not say goodbye.
That day, you made love to my ghost while a part of me watched.
That’s the shame of dying – no one knows where we are & I exited the room silently.
An architect constructed you a mansion for your heart and you called it a cage. He crafted each room with so much caution and care.
The muscle nestled between your ribs felt like a boulder I was incapable of swallowing, I am a myth, tugging on strings that have strangled me.
My fantasies were polished glass shards shattered by laments and heartbreak. Ancestors draped mirrors with black organza in bereavement after a loved one died. The fabric is as light as a ghost, so tell me, how did I still I wake up with bits of glass crunching beneath my feet?
The sadness was a fragile creature – the weight of black organza – and yet I am a myth, desiring nothing more than to pull the strings that choke me.
But it’s gentle sometimes, sneaking in like a moth, as soft as a ballerina’s skin and barbed wire.
Our wires danced across the dance floor, and if you watch, we might just choke on the memory, the softness of sadness, and the gentle lull of love.
Isabelle Palerma 