#beetleprose

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 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?

Today I went to buy lipstick and I put swatches all over my hand that left bruised magenta stains when I tried to rub them away. And then I waited outside a friend’s house for an hour just to drop her back home so she could catch her flight. If it's not I miss you then it's I’m gonna miss you. The anticipation of the loss means we're never not missing. 

I mean, I wrote poems about her for years. And it'll probably be like that forever. Because I can't shake her out of my sevens.

the last time we were here we laid in my bed and neither of us cried like we thought we would. you didn't kiss me like i hoped you would. i couldn't read you and i don't want to make up a story about what you were thinking then. i'm sick of making up stories instead of asking how you're doing. i don't even remember if i said goodbye. everything was left all over the fucking floor and i don't want to have to clean it up when you come back. which you aren't. coming back. i just want to kiss and to not think. i just want you under my arm for the night.

the heater is making this noise: it starts up for a second but it won't stay on and just keeps clattering over and over like it's trying to wake itself up but can't. it's a loop and it's beginning to get on my nerves. start and start and start and start. so: how are you doing? i am talking to a space heater. it's telling me that it's stuck and i'm telling it me too.