Isabelle Palerma

Heartbreakers: a Short Fiction

“A love story told backwards, starting from the ending.”

trigger warning: begins with a vague implication of suicide.

I don’t know how to tell you this, and maybe it’s better I don’t.

And I know one day, I’d break your heart.

Maybe it’s better I don’t.

I’m lying in a hospital bed, a mixture of medicine and whiskey in my stomach. I’m dying, Fiona.

I used to write you letters after you left me. They weren’t exactly love letters. Well, I’m not sure you ever read them, but they were begging for forgiveness, Fiona. I know I messed up along the way. I see where I screwed up now.

I sent you little photographs I took. I don’t know if you ever looked at them, Fiona, but I took small photos. Random things here & there. Pictures I thought you’d like. The moon. A watch tower. Sometimes, I’d include things I’d find on walks. Bird feathers. Business cards floating around, then stomped on by passing cars.

Anyway. I thought about us a lot before I ended up here in the hospital.

About our story.

The way you slammed the door the last night we were together. The way the stars blinked as I tried to hide my tears when I told you to get out of my house. I watched you leave. You didn’t have a car or a bus pass, but you held your chin high and walked away.

I wonder where you walked to, but you never came back like I thought you would. We had fought one last time. Screamed one last time over some stupid thing. I accused you of cheating. You told me I was stupid and suspicious.

Fiona, you were right. I was stupid and suspicious.

You were too lovely to be mine.

I knew I couldn’t keep you. I was bound to destroy something so beautiful.

I remember the glint in your eye. The hurt look in your green eyes.

A part of me wanted to rush over, to beg forgiveness, but I barrelled on anyway like an idiot, accusing you.

It was just an accusation before I shouted.

But before the accusations, before the shouting, we were in bed together, it was nice. My breath was like cigarettes and whiskey. I hadn’t known it at the time. It was just us holding one another, watching some black-and-white film. Some classic movie you begged me to see. And when I turned to kiss you, you asked me to brush my teeth.

My feelings were too delicate, I guess.

I didn’t know the brutish combination of cigarettes and whiskey.

I could have just brushed them instead of turned into a monster.

But even before the film, there was a girl who loved a boy.

She held him near and whispered away his ghosts – the ones who troubled him like that of his former friends who didn’t understand him or his mother who told him nobody would love him.

And Fiona, I wanted to ask you to marry me one day. I truly did.

And we went out on dates. I took you out and showed you off. You with your lustrous dark hair and beautiful eyes like jade. You whose hair I brushed at bedtime, after making love.

It was backwards and all out of order. I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, but I couldn’t because you were too lovely and I knew one day, you’d break my heart.

Isabelle Palerma

Vanishing Season: a Poem

Did you decide that winter
is your vanishing season?
That the frost is where you take your leave?
I have starved on less,
but you swore I wouldn’t be hungry
this January.

So, why do all my pockets have holes
and my heart vacates like a hotel room
after a weeklong conference?

So, why am I alone, holding hands
with memories and begging stars
to tell you
goodbye doesn’t mean forever?

Isabelle Palerma

This Movie Scene: a Poem

a poem built around an Evan’s Blue Song.

Within this shelter, your beating heart will be a bomb
(waiting to explode); instead of him, her, or me,
your rhetoric will be because of your enemy’s fractured heart
thudding inside their cracked rib cage.

You have written yourself off as a casualty of this war
(a hostage of this situation), and you swear
there is no way to leave this war zone, unharmed, unscathed.

(Yet, somehow, you declare the scene a happily ever after ending.)

Your beating heart demands fireworks (flashbangs with brilliant colors). My heart has always begged for pyrotechnics (as though it was crafted to create a show).

Cling to your memories, baby.

As the hours tick onward, you’ll be as distant as that far-off town you call home.

Release the demons you swallow because my memories are accessories, and my heart is a hostage to the situation.

Your energy is hemorrhaging, losing consciousness with each passing minute.

My cherished self-pity is the refrain to that song we knew all the lyrics to.

How insignificant is this movie scene to the overall effect of the montage.

How trivial.

& yet, it’s all we can think about for days.

This scene is a car crash on a rainy night home,

and we’re counting bits of broken glass as though they’re stars.

We’ve made our bed, as they say, and now we must lie in it.

Even as the broken glass scratches, leaving scars – hopeless reminders of rainy nights and car crashes.

Your memories constellate at this exact moment in time (where time stops having any meaning whatsoever).

I have to ask.

How can you bear witness to what you saw & still manage to crack a smile, darling?

Your cigarette cologne is a scent you wear all these years later like a weapon, like an aphrodisiac.

Your energy is hemorrhaging, losing consciousness with each passing minute.

Your cigarette cologne is a scent you wear
after all these years
like a weapon, like an aphrodisiac.

Your beautiful energy is hemorrahging,
losing consciousness with each passing minute.

My cherished self-pity is a memoir that fell in the rain. Warped all the pages. Ink is left smudged.

Cling to your memories.

This scene is a car crash on a rainy night home.

You’re a distant, far-off city.

We’ll stick to singing melodies of a song we all know. No cherished self-pity in the refrain. I’ll continue to remind you of graveyards & ancient tombstones, of fire escapes, and of long-abandoned lecture halls, and quiet libraries

like a ghost

We will sing melodies of a song we all know the refrain to,
yet no one picks at karaoke nights.
I will remind you of graveyards and ancient tombstones,
fire escapes, and long-abandoned lecture halls

like a ghost.

Your beautiful energy is evaporating now. We have made our bed, as they say, now, we must lie in it.

How insignificant is this movie scene.

Isabelle Palerma

with a little help from the boys at Evan’s Blue for some inspiration when I was struggling with a block.

Funeral: a Poem

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.

Isabelle Palerma

Memories: a Poem

Forgive me.
Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.
Nostalgia lies close to my skeleton bones,
and yet my past is clouded
like a mirror with its shine worn off.
Whenever I try to recall the small details of you,
it’s like gazing at a blurry photograph taken
many years ago
of someone I once loved.

& remembering your voice,
though I could listen to it the rest of my days,
is like hearing a phonograph underwater.

The way it falters in my mind
as though you have a stammer,
though I know you never stuttered.
It’s my mind that creates the gaps.

Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.

As I carry them, the past becomes less certain
and I wonder if my memories are true
or perhaps just something I wrote down
in a book.

Storytellers don’t always make the most reliable narrators,
but even through the gauzy haze,
our memories glimmer with a whispering beauty.