*spoilers*
Years ago, before I moved to Phoenix and before I moved to Long Beach, when my life was still unpredictable, when two meals a day seemed almost extravagant and cheap wine and gin were majority income expenses, I was spending an evening at the house of someone who I probably shouldn't be around when we were both drunk and unchaperoned. He had a beautifully preserved beetle in his house, hung on the wall in a glass case. I had taught a mutual friend how to re-constitute and move the limbs of dead insects without shattering their exoskeleton, and he had made a bit of a cottage industry out of displaying them. I saw the beetle, this perfect wonderful thing that almost glowed and I wanted so badly to smash it. The desire to destroy to, to make it into tiny pieces no longer recognizable as perfect and wonderful or even as beetle bits, was palpable, and I could taste that penny taste in my mouth that you get in a fight when you know you will lose but you keep on anyway, because to run away, to leave and preserve yourself, is unthinkable in that moment.

*spoilers*

That is how I feel now.

For the first time in over ten years, I heard an old family lie. At first, I was so saddened and outraged by it, this false image of me. But now, I envy this fabulism, and I dream about that perfect, fictitious naked child, so strong and conquering, and feel the reality of me to be so wormlike in contrast, cowering as I am, and recieving unprotesting, where she took what pleased her and destroyed when she had tired of it. She is powerful and full, like a new butterfly over filled of potent new blood so that it drips out of the ends of its wings.

*spoilers*

But so many, people who knew me the best I thought, believed in her, in that shining perfect evil. Believed that at least briefly, when I was pushing my nymphette years to their last, that I was her. In "1984," Winston is asked where the past is. He responds that it is in memory.

I did not destroy the beetle.

Years ago, before I moved to Phoenix and before I moved to Long Beach, when my life was still unpredictable, when two meals a day seemed almost extravagant and cheap wine and gin were majority income expenses, I was spending an evening at the house of someone who I probably shouldn't be around when we were both drunk and unchaperoned. He had a beautifully preserved beetle in his house, hung on the wall in a glass case. I had taught a mutual friend how to re-constitute and move the limbs of dead insects without shattering their exoskeleton, and he had made a bit of a cottage industry out of displaying them. I saw the beetle, this perfect wonderful thing that almost glowed and I wanted so badly to smash it. The desire to destroy to, to make it into tiny pieces no longer recognizable as perfect and wonderful or even as beetle bits, was palpable, and I could taste that penny taste in my mouth that you get in a fight when you know you will lose but you keep on anyway, because to run away, to leave and preserve yourself, is unthinkable in that moment.

That is how I feel now.

For the first time in over ten years, I heard an old family lie. At first, I was so saddened and outraged by it, this false image of me. But now, I envy this fabulism, and I dream about that perfect, fictitious naked child, so strong and conquering, and feel the reality of me to be so wormlike in contrast, cowering as I am, and recieving unprotesting, where she took what pleased her and destroyed when she had tired of it. She is powerful and full, like a new butterfly over filled of potent new blood so that it drips out of the ends of its wings.

But so many, people who knew me the best I thought, believed in her, in that shining perfect evil. Believed that at least briefly, when I was pushing my nymphette years to their last, that I was her. In "1984," Winston is asked where the past is. He responds that it is in memory.

I did not destroy the beetle. I just saw it a few days ago while on my trip to Salt Lake City, in a different house but still owned by the same boy.

"You look so healthy." I told him.

"It is because I am full of poison," he said.