beetle-toe

bad poetry is good for the soul

[beetletoe]

just wanna say retroactive jealousy fucks me up too 😞

yup!!! Glad to know I'm not alone

[beetletoe]

When I say I love you I mean I think about when we're old and you get Alzheimer's and you can't remember my face or my name or yourself and you ask me who I am and I tell you my name and you smile and tell me it's nice to meet you and I get to meet you again and again 10 times a day I get to enter your life again and again and it breaks my heart but I have loved you for so long and I will love you when I'm in the ground and when I forget your face and your name and myself and I don't want to miss any of it, the rest of your life, I want to be there when your teeth fall out and you can't see and you get sick and our parents die and the ice caps all go and our children's hairs turn grey and I can't wait to meet you, again and again.

[beetletoe]

notes from a palm reading

We met by fate, not be chance. I must be open with you, and you with me. I need to do what I loved when I was a teenager. I am missing these things that have been a part of my life for so long. How did I let it happen? Why don't I miss it like I want to? How do I get back?

Money is coming and going fast. It's time I get some control.

In the spring I will see the ocean.

People are jealous of what they think I have.

There is still something creative within me. I can't forget that.

My nails are nice.

[beetletoe]

I talk about wanting to be done with all of this, but I rarely consider the parts I will miss about these days. Walking from class, in the freezing cold and wind and snow, learning about couples counseling and attachment styles and thinking about you. Does knowing these things, writing papers on them, make me a better lover? I don't know. But I want to be better for you. Even when I believe I am good, which is not always the case, I want to be better.

All the hours spent in the car, just me. Waiting to reach you. Solo karaoke the entire time, especially in the winters when I tire sooner into the drive. The road lengthy and familiar. The fields changing with the seasons - green to gold to brown to snow - but always there.

Walking in anywhere and knowing that no one there knows me. I am a stranger to the city, still, after all these years. The freedom and the fear of it. If something happened to me, how long until anyone would notice?

The lake. The Peruvian restaurant. Singing obnoxiously in the shower because no one else is there to hear it. Staying on the phone for hours. Talking to myself. Crying just because I need to. Being a little messy just because I can. Being so young.

[beetletoe]

To love me you must know I have already found your ex from college on instagram. I have already found the accounts that she no longer uses, the ones she stills follows your old account on. The ghosts of yourselves.

I will do this when I am bored and unsupervised at work. I will do this when I am wine and tequila drunk and you are in another part of the state. I will do this and I will love you fiercely.

So much love, I don't know where it comes from. I don't like thinking about her and the other women you've known but I still love you more than I have words for. More than I could ever tell you. And I stop looking, each time I do decide to pull up her account, because I remember that it really doesn't matter. I love you like I've never loved before.

You love me hard. You may have loved hard before, and you may have for longer, but you have not loved me before. And maybe that's all you were missing before you met me.

Maybe it didn't work out before because you hadn't found someone who loved you in the way you needed to be loved. Maybe it didn't work out then because it was supposed to work out now. Maybe it wasn't her because she wasn't me.

I am lucky to have met you when I did, exactly as you are. Something in me recognizes something in you. Let's not be ghosts. I'm going to text you goodnight and shut off my phone.

[beetletoe]

On the elephant in my bag

I bought it at an antique store, my face flushed, because you told me that you were collecting elephants. It was twelve dollars and it is ugly, honestly, but I want you to have it.

Do you have any idea how many ugly elephants there are in antique shops?

If I never give you the elephant, if I chicken out, what will I do with it? Will I keep it and remember you? How long until I forget the reason behind it? Will I give it away?

This elephant, this elephant I keep in my bag for you. Do you have any idea what you do to me?

[beetletoe]

Update, gave the elephant to you.

[beetletoe]

I hope everyone else waiting is watching the way you make me laugh as we stand in line. I hope when they see us they think: that's love. And if no one could see us, if we were laughing all alone, I think the chandeliers and the carpet would know that we had it. I think the molecules that make up the air would know as they carried our breaths to the other's mouth.

You have me convinced that it's simple: you have it or you don't. I laugh in long lines with you. Love is coming home.

[beetletoe]

Please call me just to fall asleep on the phone. To listen to you breathe when I wake up afraid at 4am.

Tomorrow I will get up early to bake you banana bread. Tonight I will stay up and miss you, and miss summer, and miss being younger, and miss two hours ago when you called.

How will I ever get enough of you to satisfy this heart hunger? I will drive the 5 hours every week and I will drain my savings to pay for the gas. I will hold you even when we revisit those old, tired wounds, and I will show you where it hurts, because it will hurt, every time. This rawness is the price to pay for closeness. Always worth it, for you.

I wouldn't want to do this with anyone else. Please ask me to stay the night. To fall asleep in your arms.

[beetletoe]

this morning

from the sun-soaked driver's seat, you told me you wanted to spend mornings with me forever

walking around the park like little kids,

picking you up from the train before sunrise and getting blueberry pancakes,

taking the interstate straight into the sunrise, my cat screaming in the backseat over the music we both like,

your scrambled eggs cooked in butter.

six o'clock, waking me up with Tylenol and water,

waiting at the bus stop with your elephant,

driving you to work and kissing you goodbye.

I want mornings like this morning,

this morning, where you looked over and told me,

I have never known a love like yours.

[beetletoe]

On the elephant in my bag

I bought it at an antique store, my face flushed, because you told me that you were collecting elephants. It was twelve dollars and it is ugly, honestly, but I want you to have it.

Do you have any idea how many ugly elephants there are in antique shops?

If I never give you the elephant, if I chicken out, what will I do with it? Will I keep it and remember you? How long until I forget the reason behind it? Will I give it away?

This elephant, this elephant I keep in my bag for you. Do you have any idea what you do to me?

[beetletoe]

I hope I run into my old therapist someday. I hope that she remembers me.

This comes from the same place as the walk I took around my neighborhood when I wasn't as nice as I wished I was to the family that came to my door. I gave other reasons at the time, but I know that I took the walk so that I could run into them and try again. I didn't see that family on my walk and I still hope I will. I have a kinder introduction for them tucked behind my front teeth in case I do.

[beetletoe]

I know you're with some girl now because I saw that you made a new playlist. I know that but still,

Still I want to believe that you knew what you were doing when you gave me your wrist and a bracelet this past June.

I want to feel foolish but I don't think I am. I think it was real. Even just in part.

More importantly, though, I am not a fool. I always knew that I could go on. You have a playlist for another girl and I will go on.

I buy coffee alone and don't pick up my phone while I work. I move quietly and am no longer afraid. I trust that my life will find me. I know that I am not undone so easily.

[beetletoe]

I walk with groceries and hold my breath against the lump in my throat.

I don't feel it all the time. Only today when I saw a picture of you with a full head of hair and the dog on your lap. I feel it sometimes, too, when I think of staying strong and of the sores in your mouth and of the long winter coming for us. I can't look at the picture of us picking strawberries because it physically hurts.

I think about how if I knew this was going to happen I would've stayed closer to home. I ball my fists and throw punches at God because you are the last person to deserve this. I get His attention and ask, breathless:

how long have you known?

I grieve something that hasn't happened and might not happen for a long while, but I grieve it just in case because it could be the news I wake up to tomorrow. 

[beetletoe]

09/24/23

But the important thing is, it isn't all bad. Because it's true - I can feel myself beginning to belong, maybe. I mean, when I walk around now I see people I know. There's a familiarity being born. And if not that, at least the leaves are changing. Today felt like one of the last days of this beautiful tension between seasons. I felt summer slip away on the walk home. I felt something break. My reflection in the store windows walked alongside me. I'm here, she told me, but I'm not all you have. 

[beetletoe]

Feet hanging off the bed, 

crying to the Cocteau Twins

Counting down the weeks until I leave. 

Writing this because I have 

nothing to tell you  

And because I am so scared to lose this moment. 

[beetletoe]

on leaving no trace My sister is falling in love for the first time. He is kind to her. My mother and her speak, excited, in hushed voices from behind a bedroom door. 

I think about how, for my fifteenth birthday, the girl I loved more than a friend gave me a book of Sappho poems. Seriously. I still have it. I never read it, didn't want to be caught with it. There's no sweet note on the inside cover like you sometimes see in books at thrift stores, nothing written or underlined on any of the pages, nothing in the back; I know, I checked. She left no trace. 

My first girlfriend bought me a necklace. The pendant is buried in my childhood jewelry collection, face down. I don't know what I did with the chain. It's a miniature violet surrounded by crystals. I would tuck it under my shirt whenever I was at home, but one day I forgot and my mother asked me where I got it and I lied and stopped wearing it. It still looks new. 

It's snowing in March and I’m in the bedroom I grew up in, listening to my mother and her daughter. He gave her a big stuffed bunny rabbit and she has it out on her bed. It's bright purple and is probably too clunky to sleep with. Later I will find the pendant and run my finger over it. All morning the snow falls and doesn't stick.  

[beetletoe]

The boy I teach sight words to is telling me about the octopus that lives inside of his pen. He can't see it but he knows it must be there, he says, because that's how the pen gets its ink. He has no doubt about this. An octopus can fit anywhere, he tells me. It's one of those moments that I will myself, frantically, not to forget. It holds some sort of truth and meaning that can't be obtained elsewhere. God, I think, why don't I think about things this way?