May 23, 2022
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A Brief History of My Failed Suicide Attempts
By Simone Person
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A Brief History of My Failed Suicide Attempts
By Simone Person
When I could still love you, I’d dream you. Us, happy
somewhere decent, full on only each other’s breath,
even though we’d never had much honeysuckle & petaled heart.
Once, I dreamt I agreed to watch your houseplants
while you were away, had filled my entire dining room with the fragile arches
of lilies, lazy drooping of spider plants, shocks of tulips & roses,
& miles of flowers I could not name. I was fragrant with lonely,
just as I was while awake, & I drifted through this greenery of you,
hoping to fill the growing hole of your departure. I tamped the soil
of each pot, watered their hungry roots, & adjusted
them towards the windows so they could experience the widest
sunshine. On the last plant, a towering thing of palm-sized leaves
& branches as thick as a pinky, I spun it around, expecting nothing.
But this other side was gnarled, crusted over with neglect, & crumbled
against my fingers. It jolted me & I was dumped back to this plane,
my head a storm & my heart the thinnest needle. I have this half-memory
from my handful of childhood Masses, something about a man dreaming of bloated
cows being swallowed by others as quick as a pulse & the destruction
of golden statues. Unlike you, I was only kept in the faintest tendrils
of the Church, so, I have no ephemeral metaphors to weave here.
But in that moment, sleep evaporating from my eyes, I felt
like that amalgamation of forgotten kings: this was a warning;
heed or perish. I chose perish. I’ve found that I usually do. In my scrambling
for safety, that gut-warming illusion of control, I’ll land in the burning
of my worst endings. I told you before—although I’m sure
you were not listening—that I felt hounded by Death.
At five, I leapt into a pool’s deep end for no good reason at all,
watched my breath bubble to the surface, didn’t try to stop
sinking. Humming halo of death curl. Then, on the playground, I dug deep
through the sand & found a palmful of glass. I pressed its sharp edges hard
into the thicket of my wrist until I heard the wilding of my blood. I flourished
under pain’s shimmer. Years later, as a barely-girl, I secreted
to my babysitter’s abandoned RV, rested my tongue’s heat on boys
too old to have any tender interest in me. I was so easy to steal away.
Time stretched & I ignited a shed while still inside, marveled at how quickly smoke coated
the flash of my tongue. As I grew older, threaded with the terror of my wanting,
I drank too much around men who only wanted to turn me bonemeal
with the shrapnel of their grip, & then I’d drink some more.
I careened from danger so many times, I was bound to stumble.
You were the first person who electrified me. I thought
it had to mean something, that I could still correct my course.
You said we’d found each other across the frenzy of the cosmos.
It was the pearled threads of fate. You’d accidentally been right:
if it hadn’t been me, if it hadn’t been you, it would’ve been another.
You always end up here, & I forever find Death
in all my crooked musings. The worst of it is not what you did to me,
what you took, not the ease you had in this honeyed consumption,
that it was your destiny, but that I thought I loved it.
Maybe I don’t find Death but make it. Relish the familiarity
of my own handspun cruelty. When I was born, I clawed
my way out, nearly killing my mother. You, too, arrived
with a necessity for violence. Or maybe the truth
is that I recognized your hands’ grave looming vigil-tall
& ran right towards it, hopeful this time I wouldn’t escape.
Simone Person
Simone Person (they/them) is a Black queer femme, two-time Pink Door Writing Retreat fellow, and the managing editor at just femme & dandy. They are the author of Dislocate (Honeysuckle Press, 2018) and Smoke Girl (Diode Editions, 2019), and they were selected as a first-place winner of Boston Review’s 2021 Annual Poetry Contest by Sonia Sanchez. Simone grew up in small Michigan towns and Toledo, Ohio. They can be found at simoneperson.com. Follow them on Twitter and Instagram.
Image Description: A photo of Simone Person—a fat lightskinned Black femme—looking into the camera. They have long black, curly hair and are wearing dark brown lipstick, black winged eyeliner, and black floating eyeliner above their eyelids’ crease. They’re holding their cat, Tankie—a chubby, brown tabby with big green eyes and a blue collar—over their shoulder, who is looking away.