She wonders what it would be like to swallow all her pills and fall asleep. Thoughts darker than the night fill her mind. Pulling her from the feeble grasp of sleep. Long days of silence broken only by his taunting undulating inhalations and exhalations. A now-stranger lies a million miles away across the king sized bed. The mattress where love was once made now presses firmly against her back. Still and cold. Dead. She drifts lightly off holding the pill bottle tight in her palm. Security blanket - she knows she could make it all go away so easily. But she also believes she deserves this. Pennants for a sin that left her broken and corrosive. Doomed to destroy what remains of herself and anyone foolish enough to love her. Trapped in the purgatory of her memory - Heart racing her eyes open wide, searching. The weighted blanket wrapped heavily across her in a sad embrace that does not erase the heavy absence of his arm across her body. Shadows play on the dark walls like his fingers once danced along her skin tracing her curves. She feels nothing as she runs her own fingers about the forgotten canvas of her body. She returns the pill bottle to her nightstand and expertly finds the cold hard handle of the pocket knife she keeps hidden “for emergencies” next to her bed. Dreaming of the warmth of feeling something - anything - as the blade faintly glides over the scar on her left wrist. “I’m so sorry,” she pleads into the darkness. She could finally sleep. Her secrets never spoken would die with her like all the things she should have but never could bring herself to say. He’d wake and find her as cold and hollow as he’d said she was these last few years. It would still be painfully quiet. The bed would feel just as empty. She returns the blade to its hiding place. It would be so easy. But she can’t. Not tonight.
Amber Jasinski has been writing poetry about the human experience and mental illness for the past several years. She has an undergraduate degree in nursing and works full time as a Registered Nurse.
She is a wife and mother and lives in a full house with her husband, 3 daughters, 2 young grandchildren, her younger brother, and 2 awesome dogs!
She enjoys writing as an avenue to explore her own journey with mental illness and to promote mental health advocacy.
She writes under the name ajblueorion on social media where you’ll find her “lost somewhere between the words and melancholy madness.”
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