Published
I didn’t notice the swarm of mayflies at first. I was busy wrestling with the memory of someone’s hand on my waist, replaying every possible alternative to what I could have said or done. But there they were, shimmering in the late afternoon light, desperate and glorious for their single day of life.
In these mountains, people are measured by how they face the insects. Some fear them, some crush them. I wasn’t sure which group I belonged to that afternoon in the Sierra Nevadas. But I knew why I was there. I had cracked my heart open, and for the first time in my then-25 years of life, my sister stepped in to help piece me back together. After leaving New York in an attempt to flee, or perhaps rectify a certain murkiness, I found myself in Republican County, a swamp.
I was the only newcomer in town that week. The rest of the population was busy testing the waters of the manmade lake; rumors of high fecal matter were persistent. The lake had been dredged decades ago, filled and drained, filled and drained, an artificial body of water that had become real by virtue of time. I joined them, at least in the sense that I showed up and hovered near the edges. That’s where I caught the eyes of a few sunburnt men who stood knee-deep in tepid water, beer cans bobbing at their sides like loyal companions.
It wasn’t long before the men started to bring me variants of dragonflies, a sort of swampland courting ritual. I didn’t know how to refuse, so I accepted the living, quivering tokens thrust into my hands. These poor creatures, pawns in the white man’s attempt to get some ass. Perhaps I could use them on my nieces, take a page from the boardshort playbook, and try to court the girls into letting me kiss them goodnight.
The next morning, at the crack of daybreak and delusion, I decided I’d let the bugs go. These frantic, tiny bodies and I were the same: yearning to be chosen, to be set free, but destined to collide again and again with what refused to give. I know, for I had done the same. I had waited for something that wasn’t coming. I had let love turn me into a creature with no sense of self-preservation.
I had known, in some unspoken way, that my love was picking someone else. There had been signs—small shifts, long pauses where words should have been, a hesitation in their touch, a pulling away so gradual that by the time they were gone, it was as if they had never really been there at all. And yet, I stayed. I pressed myself against their silence, willing it to break.
I opened the jar. Some things can only exist under the right conditions.
In that morning’s release, I remembered what it was like to truly love. It wasn’t the loss that reminded me—it was the fact that I had given everything without hesitation, without calculation, without a safety net. Love had made me reckless in the most honest way, had turned my body into an offering, had made my world expand beyond myself. Even in heartbreak, that love remained, not as regret, but as proof that for a time, I had been fearless. And then, as the sky opened itself up to the day, the heartbreak quieted to a pulse I could manage.
That was when the butterflies appeared. They glided into the yard in vibrant, swirling shapes—blue and blending into the sky. I found myself chasing them without thinking, arms outstretched, laughing. Unattached but desperate at the same time.
Those delicate bodies seemed to find me drifting through the secret gullies of the hills, weaving childlike magic into the spaces between the pine trees. I’d catch them hovering near the porch as I drank my coffee or fluttering alongside my nieces as they blew bubbles into the wind.
I didn’t fear them, nor did I crush them; there was a certain mutual understanding that we shared the same raw, open sky. Something in their cyclical existence told me I was part of a new beginning, no matter how tenuous or strange.
When my last day approached, I could tell the mountains were done keeping me. I’d learned the patterns of strangers’ eyes. I’d learned that bugs ruled this place in quiet, unwavering ways–that the dragonflies skimmed the water like they were tethered to it, that the butterflies moved without urgency because they understood time differently than we did, that mayflies, born only to vanish, filled the air with proof that they had been here at all. And still, I knew I was not one of them, that I would soon pack my bags and return to a place of faster footsteps and fewer insect offerings.
The sun was higher than usual when we piled into the truck. My nieces fought over a single stuffed animal while someone fiddled with the radio. Their squeals were quickly drowned out by the beating of the wind and the whiplash of country prophecy. We lurched onto the main road, dust swirling. The sky that morning was wide open and welcoming.
As I looked ahead, a blue insect splattered on the windshield.
