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⚠️Trigger Warning: The following poem contains subject matter pertaining to self-harm, suicide, and voluntary psychiatric hospitalization⚠️
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This is not my first heartbreak. I've had many, and I've certainly had worse.
Although,
at the time,
my heart would have plead
irreparable.
(If only I knew
what was to come
two years later--
but there's a poem
for another day.
In fact,
I believe
you've read it.)
This is the first heartbreak
I feel everywhere--
a cataclysmic aching
that I am certain
will reduce my pulse to
flatlines.
This is my first anxiety attack. My fingernails scrape violently
at my collarbone as if they are looking to fulfill
some distant, unadulterated urge to tear myself apart.
(They are digging
for what whispers beneath--
a dying thing.)
But I cannot
escape
this Incarceration;
I cannot escape the shuddering confines of my own body. So
I tear away my clothes until I am left in just my underwear. rocking myself back and forth like the mad girls do in the movies.
(Is it true?
Have I gone mad?)
I run the shower even though I don't have any intention of showering. I do this only so my mum
doesn't hear me sobbing,
the sounds of which
are concealed by
the water's blaze.
The room fogs over--
and all the world
is a mist.
and suddenly, I don't know what to do with myself. and suddenly, I don't give
an absolute fuck
about what happens to me
anymore.
For this simple reason, I decide to go to the hospital.
Take away my
dignity.
Take away my independence. Just promise- fucking promise me-- you'll take away the pain too. You don't (of course). "Please don't tell me you're here because of a boy." This is one of the first things-- perhaps even the first thing-- the doctor says to me. "What? Did you think the two of you would ride off into the sunset and live out the rest of your days on some faraway island?" (Something to this extent, yet still not an exaggeration.) See, to doctors, broken hearts are a ridiculous waste of time. They prefer to deal in broken things they can easily cast and bandage in fluorescent colours
upon which all the people
you know can then sign,
"Get well soon."
But there is no one to sign get well soon across the
war-torn latitude of my chest.
Because no one truly believes there is anything for me to recover from--
they can't see it,
so it mustn't be real
(right?)
Thanks
for cutting a girl down
when she's already bleeding,
(literally,
and I've got the scars
to prove it.)
Doc, don't ya know it was never about just a boy? It was about
yet another instance of
rejection I was forced to add to my repertoire of not-good-enoughs,
yet another loss
magnified
by my ailing brain.
(what came first--
the plague,
or the boy?
Do I even have to
provide a fucking answer
to such an obvious question?)
Doc-- I know what type of person you are:
an egotistical ass hat who thinks mental illness is inferior to Physical Illness cuz it's all in my head it's all in my head it's all in my head
right? Doc, what if I told ya
"It" is always trying to kill me? What if I told you "It" wants nothing more than to reduce my pulse--
my broken heart--
to flatlines?
Would you take back what you said?
(probably not).
Image Source:
Asylum patient rocking herself to and fro gif (n.d.). [image] Available at: https://gifimage.net/trastornos-mentales-gif-7/[Accessed 25 Apr. 2020]
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