glass jar

Recently my thoughts have been drawn, like moths to a flame, to how our memories and actions often seem to be incompatible with each other. How do we live with ourselves? We erect walls of glass within our minds to separate our contradictions, so they may coexist, but never quite meet. We know to never allow those ideas to touch, for the resulting explosion could be quite messy. And when, as does eventually happen, they force themselves onto our consciousness and buzz annoyingly on the glass walls, we quickly slap them down. Nothing is more painful than facing ourselves as we truly are, without the glass to hide behind.

This seed that took root in my mind came from within and without, as it were, though I was somewhat coerced in the matter. For class, I selected my summer reading, and through it I came to know that we inflict inhumane cruelties upon our animal counterparts, simply for our culinary pleasure. Consider the lobster. Into the pot of boiling water it goes with hardly a second glance. Now, we may think we know that lobsters do not feel pain, but upon watching one cling on the side of the pot like a man hanging from a cliff would, or as would a man dragged by the head into the den of a lion, or hearing the frantic tap, tap of the lobster’s claws on the lid of the pot, we may be influenced to change our opinion.

Not that I have witnessed this inhumane torture. I am a vegetarian, as is my family. As one who eats only plants and other things that cannot move nor feel, the cooking of a lobster in my home would be as strange an occurrence as waking up in the morning to find my hands turned to claws, with which all I could do is pinch. So, having never taken part in those immoral activities, I am innocent of the inhumanity of the others.

Those thoughts of my innocence were somewhere in the back of my mind a few days ago, when I walked through the tall grass near parkland collage. I thought of my innocence when I reached into my bug catching net, and when I filled my bug jar with squirming, crawling, twitching bugs, dying slowly but surely as poisonous fumes extinguished the small spark of life in each. But this grand, silent opera of death was beneath my notice, though hidden only by the glass of a mason jar. I willingly walled off the part of my mind that could see those dying creatures, walled if off as I chased the bugs down and tipped them into my mason jar of death, where they flip onto their backs and twitch their legs until they lay still, their stiff legs sticking straight in the air, reaching for the thin piece of metal that keeps them from their home.

Yet, I am innocent. Those chitinous creatures do not feel pain: I read it in my textbook. Now it is true that we are not bugs, and so we do not contain within our skulls their tiny kernel of a brain (though I sometimes wonder about that when I consider those closest to me), and therefore cannot ultimately make conclusions regarding the experiences of something so alien to us. We, as homo sapiens sapiens, can only make educated guesses. And the guess, given by the renowned scientists who painstakingly compiled the vast information into the hefty from of a brick of a textbook, is that bugs do not feel pain. I must, then, be innocent, for I have committed no harm. I have not, for instance, boiled a lobster.

But as I sit writing this, I can recall my childhood self, and now my memories come flooding in, and now that the glass has started to crack, I wish it would stop. These memories have a strange quality to them, they are as if I am not seeing them as they were but as a reflection. I look out of my eyes, for from no other’s eyes can I see, and yet I do not use my own eyes. This memory has been walled away for so long that I no longer believe that It was me. And yet it was.

I recall the blue of my bed and the blue of my walls and the blue of the sky through the window, though they are all darkened and distorted as if I am seeing it as the reflection from the black irises of my eyes. And now, I remember. I remember the stillness. The stillness of that blue room. I remember the blue fly, as it flew then sat still on the window. How a hand reached up to it. In my mind now that hand is not a hand but a claw which inched forward slowly as though underwater. The claw that closed around the fly, and slowly, almost lovingly, ripped its wing from its buzzing body. The fly fell then, and lay spinning on the floor, as if it didn’t know that more buzzing would be useless, as if it didn’t know that it would never fly again, and once the movement stopped the boy still stood, drifting with the peace of the absolute quiet. 

What is so cruel is that child had not yet read the textbook that would only come into his possession many years later. He did not know what I know now. Yet even now I am unsure that what I know is true. Shouldn't that existence of doubt stop me from committing the same acts that I did before? But then again, of what can we be absolutely sure? On what are we judged, our intentions, or our impact? And how am I different than that little boy of years ago?

I am no different, and that is the sad truth. The powdery pigment that fell from wings of moths and butterflies still stains my hands. It probably will forever. And those moths and butterflies are stuck with a pin on a styrofoam board. When before I was calmed by the frantic movements of the dying fly, now I am cheered by my classmates regard for my skill. I must have collected half the butterflies of Illinois. Even now, though hating myself for what I have done, I still feel pride. I am not innocent. I cannot be… right? Does this admission, in some way, atone for my sins? Does my regret make up for what I have done, what I will still do? What happens when we look through the glass into the past, only to find our own reflection staring back at us? Know it or not, we all just fly in circles. We all have but one wing. So, I will still tip those bugs, and my thoughts, my feelings, and my memories, into that mason jar and screw the lid on tight. But, trapped in my own mind, I will never be free from myself.