Bitter Cocoa Butter Kisses & and my experience writing it

Bitter Cocoa Butter Kisses

In November 2020 I decided to try something new. I’ve been obsessing over this poem “An Open Letter to My Depression” by Tonia Ingram ever since I saw it when I was seventeen or so, that’s how I found Button Poetry. Back then I thought I was completely incapable of writing poetry, I knew almost nothing about it, other than the fact that I loved it deeply. Naturally, being me, I decided to try for their chapbook contest. Then I googled what on earth was a chapbook. I remember thinking to myself: “I’ve got about three months to get in this contest, the deadline is January 2021… I can do it.”

I actually did it. I wrote a chapbook called “Not a Walk in the Park” where I talked about my mental illness. It took me less than a month to write it and edit it. I was relieved after I sent it to them in December, but at the same time I felt empty and sad; I wanted to write more. So I did, I wrote Bitter Cocoa Butter Kisses and also sent it to them in early January. Then I joined Twitter, realized that a lot of people were self-publishing and it worked! I wasn’t sure if I could use my already written chapbooks, so I wrote Secrets of the Concrete Life and self-published it on August 4th, 2021. 

I wasn’t even a finalist in Button Poetry’s Chapbook Contest. Bummer. Just kidding, I felt like the greatest failure in the world, but at the same time I realized it meant I had two chapbooks to self-publish. I picked Bitter Cocoa Butter Kisses to be my second chapbook because when I wrote it I felt physically ill. I’ve had my fair share of traumatic experiences in life, believe me (or check my “Wonderland Mind”) but the situation that inspired these poems killed everything inside of me. If my eighteen year old self was to see me on the street, she wouldn’t recognize me. 

The story behind Bitter Cocoa Butter Kisses does not have gore, sexual assault, or pedophilia, which I think it’s a lot worse than “getting into a fight with your aunt, and breaking up with your boyfriend” (putting it lightly). But those three months changed the course of my life.

It all happened four years before I wrote the chapbook, but writing it was terrible. I would catch myself smoking a pack of cigarettes, taking “cry breaks”, putting on a happy playlist to try and distract myself. I had bad (bad) thoughts while writing it, because it felt like reliving it, specially because I went through the pictures, the videos, the recording that inspired “Cinderella” (Oh yes, I recorded the verbal abuse and when I showed it to my parents they were in disbelief, while I felt sad that I didn’t get the worse part).

After writing it, I had to revise it and edit it, so I put myself through it again. Then again. Again. Again. Again. Writing a book needs a lot of revising, and I am the Goddess of Drama Queens. I wanted every word to be soaked in the emotions I felt. I wanted to be as real as possible, from the dreamlike dates I had with my first boyfriend, the way he smelled, the way he made me feel, every single hair in his head to the pain and misery my aunt put me through. It was terrible, and I loved it! Everytime it became too much to handle I felt so proud of myself. When I cried and laughed and fell in love with my ex again, I was doing my job as a writer; I kept thinking that if I was feeling it, chances are the readers will feel it too.

A couple of months ago I decided it was time to actually make the ebook, where I added the pictures I took (in Germany 2016, when it all happened) and once again it felt like dying. I think I still had hope my ex would see it and fall in love with me all over again, or that he had been waiting for me like Gatsby. I sent him a message on IG, he never answered, and I waited all year long.

Funny thing happened last month though, I started making the promotion pictures for the book and I used little quotes from the poems and I didn’t feel sad. There’s no sadness in my heart for this moment in my past, and there’s no love for that boy anymore (which makes me sad, I don’t want to let go! I want Gatbsy and his fancy parties for me… That’s probably not gonna happen, it took me five years but I got it now). Today, I learned to love and respect my present; just a writer at 4 am in the morning, with my cat scratching the side of my mattresses that is not covered by the sheets, and I love it.