Letter to Myself

By Lena DiBiasio

Discussed: Mental Illness

This piece was written to myself, and is a reflection of the self-hatred that I often feel as a teenage girl. It also depicts the enveloping and consuming nature of my anxiety.

Smooth watermelon rinds glide across sticky glass tables
Those tables my grandfather had on the crumbling patio out back
Next to the lawn full of dog shit I wouldn't dare step foot on.
I am a mourning dove, cooing at your window and waiting
And you
Are your mothers greatest disappointment beyond her graying strands

Tomorrow, air will struggle to reach soft pink lungs, 
Wheezing in and out as the briny taste of seawater hits my lips
There are ants in the bathroom and Mother isn't sure what to do
Do not kill. Do not harm them because they are living and breathing as I am living and breathing
The bed is caving in underneath me as I feel the soft tickle of movement on my body
My toes, feet, ankles, calves are covered in a thin layer of ant
But I cannot kill.
A man hobbled, then lies still on the bench outside
But you fail to slip a dollar into his cup. 
I see it sticking out of your dirty, filthy pocket.
Your dirty, filthy hands instead reach for the volume button to sing you a pleasant lullaby.

You love pistachio ice cream. You seem like the type of person to love pistachio ice cream. 

The ants have reached my torso but I let them be
Watermelon has the taste of a soggy rag and still I savor the seeds in my mouth as if I will not see tomorrow
The ants are swallowing me whole now and the tears begin to fall, though they do not wash away the teeming black dots on my increasingly raw flesh. I did not know ants could bite.
My thoughts return to you because we sadly share so much in common
Dear friend, you are nothing to me but a yellow tulip, crushed 
under the sole of yet another passerby
And I am nothing but a mourning dove 
Passing by. 

Process

This poem was written after a five-minute free-write, where my mentor and I wrote down as many random words and phrases as we could. After forming this list, I attempted to include as many as I could into a poem while maintaining structure and a coherent message. Emotions of anxiety and self-hatred had been weighing down on me around the time when I wrote this poem, so I strung together the list of random words as an outlet for these feelings.