Sometimes I feel like I’m living in an aquarium.
No, it’s not any great transparency to my actions. It’s that I have sliding glass doors, don’t draw the shades, and at night, the light draws the bugs to beat against the glass. We live butted up against one of those we-can’t-put-houses-so-this-is-now-green-space creek things, even for North Carolina, which is essentially a swamp, so we’re talking a serious quantity of bugs, including some moths that look like they should be starring in really weird Japanese movies with tiny fairy women who are trying to save the world from MechaRodan by summoning Atlantis with a fuzzy animal that shits gold.*
Wander idily around the living room, as I restlessly do, and I find myself staring at the undersides of a fair number of bugs, although thank god, the giant june bugs of earlier days are long gone now that it’s actually June.
The fireflies are out en masse, though, in the evening, and since it rained briefly this evening, there was a moment when it was cool and wet and the fireflies were a great wave of alternating Christmas light patterns under the trees. And this was good. I don’t love North Carolina, I’ll be honest–it has its high points, but I don’t get the almost physical, hollow ache of affection and smallness that the desert had for me. It’s only been a few months, so possibly that will change, although frankly, the Great Wiggler Invasion set the state back in my affections pretty hard. But I like it well enough. It’s not bad. You can live here and be happy. On the one hand, wigglers, on t’other hand, fireflies. On the one hand, flying wood roaches up to two inches long that get in the house and buzz around frantically trying to get out again (they can’t live in houses, particularly if they enter my line of sight), on the other hand, health insurance and as much of a social life as I’ve had in years. There are worse trade-offs to make, even if one does occasionally feel like they’re living in an aquarium.
*This was an actual Mothra movie. I can’t make things like that up.
