We searched all life for that
perfect love, the butterflies, the tremor.
They sold us butterflies
the way they sold us devotion
told us love should make our hands shake,
that nausea was passion announcing itself,
that if we could eat in your presence
we were not doing it right.
I learned this lesson so well
I forgot there was ever a time before the flutter,
before I measured my heartbeat against yours
and called the arrhythmia chemistry.
Every movie taught me to chase the panic,
to believe calm meant I had settled,
that security was what happened after the real thing faded
a consolation prize
for women who had stopped
measuring their worth in insomnia.
I was a master of mis-translation,
calling terror attraction,
adrenaline fate,
and the cortisol flooding my veins romance.
I ignored every signal that screamed THREAT
and called the wreckage devotion
with hands that shook
when your name lit my phone at 2 AM
like some ghost haunting my well-being.
You bring your butterfly collection
those perfect specimens pinned to foam,
bilateral and stopped
and say this is what love should look like.
All I see is dead symmetry.
Wings that will never beat again
but oh, how they match.
And why did you kill so many?
But I had been trained so carefully
to misread danger as desire,
to believe that if my body
was not performing field medicine
just to survive being near you
I was not truly in love.
How could I have known?
They pathologize peace in every love song,
diagnose safety as boring,
convince us that reliable love
is something you grow into
only after passion dies.
And I was so hungry for the flutter,
so desperate to feel something
that matched what they promised love would be,
that I fed my body to the butterflies
and called it devotion,
always choosing the wrong guy,
always needing the anxiety,
while calling everyone else boring.
Real love calcified in my bones
like a fossil record,
like evidence
like something that did not feed on
threat assessment disguised as chemistry.
The butterflies were never excitement.
They were my body
trying to save me
from what my brain
insisted on calling fate.
I am learning
to trust the absence of wings
the silence of no flutter,
no checking my phone every three minutes
to decode which version of you I would get today.
I am learning
that when my stomach stops performing acrobatics,
that is not boredom arriving.
That is finally safe.
That’s all from me, your turn to ask what if.
Thank you for reading my work! Hi, I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself! I write poems when I’m angry, fiction when I’m hopeful, and dystopias when I’m paying attention.
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I am a published writer. Curriculum of Feelings is a haunting, six-part journey that spans centuries and species, a visceral exploration of the “Problem of Evil.”
Through a collection of short stories, you follow five distinct vessels: a poetess silenced by her world, a slave who finds freedom in language, a tree that witnesses history’s worst acts, a whale carrying a dying song, and a boy tracking a collapsing future. Each life is a lesson in humility, humanity, and pain.
You can buy my book on Amazon.
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Nicole, Cortisol Sonata, is astounding. One of the best poems I've read in a long time. And I read a lot of poems, every day. You should accept this as the high form of compliment that it is.
Learning to trust the absence of wings… 🪽 Beautifully said.
Although, I’ve been married 30+years and every now and the I still get butterflies over us. 🦋 😏