THE MOTH
The moth got stuck between the curtain and the window and started flapping its wings violently at around 12:30 AM. It was brown and dusty, and the noise it made would scare the living daylights out of the bravest of men. It was the sound of despair. Of suffocation. Of being stuck in the middle of a horrid nightmare, the kind that wakes you up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and makes you wanna burst into tears.
I felt everything the animal was feeling: a deep electrical pain took over my entire body as I got up to see it through the other side of the glass. It was in pain, I could tell. I could FEEL its pain. It was a paralyzing one. As it sat at the bottom of the glass window, unable to understand why it was trapped in this stupid conundrum, I turned on the lights of the terrace, popped the lock and opened the gate, hoping the air and the strepitous noise would give it some sense of hope; one that could get it out of its self-inflicted misery, but most of all, of my room and my house, entirely shook by its horrid, claustrophobic stay. “How do moths get in these situations?”, I thought to myself. Why do they seem to be so inconspicuous when they enter a house, invisible to the human eye and ear? And why do they decide to let you know that they’re there at the most unusual time?
It was 12:32 and the moth did not move. It just sat there. Terrified of my presence, just like I was of its own. We were both aware of each other, in the middle of the cold night, not moving an inch.
I stared at it for a good, long 5 minutes. It was a gorgeous, terrifying lepidopteran, of chocolate colored wings with black dots sparkling with cosmic dust and long, black antennae popping curiously out of its velvet caterpillar body. Superstition and a sense of kindness kept me from killing it. They say a moth is a sign of resurrection, of starting over, and both of those things are connected to death, so fear overwhelms the man who encounters a moth in the loneliest of times.
Only fear could drive me to get back in the room where it laid, trapped between the confines of its own nocturnal nature. Only fear would make me open that curtain and, in the case of it deciding to want to stay in the room, only fear would give me the courage to stomp it to death against a wall with a broom or a mop. I moved the window and it started its violent dance against itself, unable to see the way out, even the light it craved. I remembered Janet Jackson’s first verse on ‘That’s The Way Love Goes’: “like a moth to a flame, burned by the fire, my love is blind, can’t you see my desire?”
I decided to enter the room with only one purpose: set it free. As horrified as I was to confront this feeling of imprisonment, it was obvious it didn’t want to be there, it didn’t want to stay, but it couldn’t understand why. Its natural instinct to escape was caught between the window and the door, and it was slowly asphyxiating it, deemed it incapable to see the way out, however easy or quick it seemed. It needed help.
It came in the form of a broken man, barely able to sleep at night, at his 45 years of age. I opened the curtain slowly but firmly; the tension wafted out of the room swiftly, mixing with the chilly night air. Neither of us felt the terror of the species any longer. I approached it with a little trepidation, careful not to break its wings, so that it could fly, so that it knew that the push was a generous one, an act of kindness, in spite of the terror and the pain we both had caused. I proceeded to flick my finger against its right wing to which it responded violently, leaving small specks of shiny dust on my fingernails, once again beating itself against the window, thinking the curtain in the back was still there. Then it became aware: it was being released. It had been self imprisoned, but this it didn’t know, this had simply happened.
The moth shook its wings rapidly and moved with liberty towards the open door. Suddenly it knew which way to go. It crawled painfully towards the edge of the exit because freedom, no matter how beautiful, is painful. Then it felt the sudden air it longed for what seemed like a year gently caress its entire body. As it lifted itself on the air, once again the sound of wings flapping startled me. I took a step back and closed my eyes, but caught the shadow of its presence with the sound. When I opened them back up, it was gone. And then, for a brief moment afterward, it felt like it was never there.
