Dear Squash Bugs,
I hate you.
I hate you with the heat of a thousand suns. I wish you would die.
No, wishing your death is too easy for you and too difficult for me. Because, as you probably know, killing you quickly and en masse could also kill my beloved and productive honeybees. Are you productive? No. Are you beloved? Not by a soul. Not by anyone who knows the real you.
So instead I wish you banishment to a land where no zucchini or pumpkins or eggplant grow. I wish you a new and unfamiliar home devoid of even cucumber plants. Because apparently my abundant squash garden wasn’t enough for you, and you had to also decimate my raw pickles.
Squash bugs, I hope that whenever you get dolled up and go out on the town, you unwittingly drag behind you long strands of filthy toilet paper from the public restroom stall where, ironically, there was no TP for you to clean yourself. Like you care. You’re so disgusting.
I hope that the cute doctor with whom you flirt shamelessly sees you to your dark, destructive core and gags when you speak. I hope people give bad Yelp reviews to the restaurants and hotels you frequent, just because you stink up the place so much.
And I hope that when you enter a public swimming pool mothers drag their children to safety and even apathetic teenaged boys are disgusted at sharing the chlorinated water with you.
In fact, I hope that one by one your supposed friends abandon you and are embarrassed to have ever been associated with you.
May you invite other insects to a dinner party at your new stupid squash bug house, and may they all accept with saccharine grins, but at the last minute everyone secretly coordinates to just not show up. So you have to do all the work anyway then just sit there alone, watching your candles burn slowly in the greedy solitude. You’ll have to eat all that food yourself, but you’re used to that, aren’t you? You didn’t prepare it with anyone else in mind, anyway. You’re so selfish.
I hope that every person who has endured your belittling, condescending, manipulative personality over the years will get to watch your slow, awkward, painful decline. I hope you starve and suffer no matter how many of our pumpkins you have stolen. And I hope that the pumpkins still in your grasp see you for the monster you are.
Is that why you do it, squash bugs? Do you know what a monster you are, yet you hate yourself for it, and your nastiness is a cry for help? Are you begging for attention, affirmation, acceptance?
You will never be accepted. There is no excuse for the things you have done so repeatedly. And any attention you get is, at best, pity.
You have hurt us for the last time, and the scars you have left will only cause us to fight back harder next year. Because you will not have the final word, not with my garden.
Squash bugs, you are just ugly, pathetic, desperate opposition to anything good and true and beautiful.
And that eggplant makes your butt look enormously fat.
Run and hide.
XOXOXO
Marie
