Wednesday 16 June 2010

moths*

Look what I found the other day. I was trying to sleep the night before my last exam and was really struggling. But I didn't feel more than usually anxious. Rather, I was hearing this whispering sound which made me feel like I was going mad. Maybe I was anxious? Maybe my stress had metamorphosised into schizophrenia?

Eventually at one in the morning I got out of my bed and began walking in the direction of the 'voices'. I pulled my bedroom blind up and out it flew - a mouth buzzing so quick it was barely visible. I had found it half a day earlier but opened my window and thought it flew out. Then I found another one later that day which vanished when I left the room to find something to catch it with. This photo is of the first moth sighting:

I began wondering after I managed to kill the one AM moth (no, I don't eat meat; yes, I do kill bugs if they were all the same both or not. Google taught me exactly the genre of moth and its chosen prey (thankfully I have completely forgotten all the details) and I began imagining hoard of moths eating at my cotton, cashmere, wool and silk (as I said, I think that's what they eat; I seem to have blanked the specific info out from my memory as some sort of coping mechanism). What if I have an infestation?

When I first looked at this photo I took, I felt only disgust and fear. Luckily, I haven't since sighted another of these animals. Now, a week later, the fear of total invasion slightly abated, I canadmire the precise outline of its 2D shape, the painterly quality of the complementary tones and the symmetry. I got a passport photo taken the other day and I realised for the first time in my life how remarkably unsymmetrical my nose is.

And so the moth became beautiful.

*Yes, I know, my blog post titles are getting totally shit. It's between being really unimaginative or cringeworthy right now - the alternative title I wanted to use originally was 'the fear'

2 comments:

  1. *shudder* I hate all insects. Even ladybugs!

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  2. I hate bugs... but what I really panic is cockroachs!!!!

    xoxo

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