Back on Earth there’s a creature that’s survived every ecological disaster thrown at it. They come out at night and rub their back appendages together, a celebration that they made it another day without being eaten, crushed, or poisoned.
Chirp.
Chirp.
Crickets: a staple of the night, and most evenings wouldn’t be the same without their ubiquitous melody. Some stations even play the noise at night--a crazy psychologist probably came up with that one--and it’s gotten to the point where people don’t know what a cricket is, only the sound they make.
For me, a place without crickets is not something I notice, not right away anyway. Not even on the second night. It takes several restless nights of unease until it hits me--no chirping. No celebration that we’ve made it through to another day. Just the humming of whatever machinery, or snathces of conversations as people walk past my door. It’s the lack of that small reminder that makes the biggest difference on the hardest days; it’s those days that I lay awake until morning, thoughts spiraling down the drain, hoping for something that will never come.
Chirp.
Chirp.
Crickets: a staple of my world, and my days wouldn’t be the same without their ubiquitous melody. They chirp, somewhere out there, even if I can’t hear them. They’re survivors, and will continue to persist long after I’m gone. Until everyone I know is gone. Forever, it seems at times.
But what is forever?
Pointless, because none of us will ever live to see it, to experience it. Just another loss for the home team and the longest losing streak of any team out there. What we’re able to experience is limited by what we are. Some could say that we were never meant to experience such things, but I lay awake imagining what it would be like to see the invisible. To do the impossible, to break the unbreakable.
To live forever and never lose anything.
But it’s not possible. I’m limited by what I am. And as much as I can do with myself each day, there are infinite other things that I’ll never do. Reasons aside, it’s hard to consider how things could be different.
Painful, even.
But what can you do when you lose someone you didn’t even get a chance to know properly? Someone you clicked with, felt there could be something? It’s like finding each twilight cricket and crushing it, not stopping until the night is silent and every survivor killed. It’s hard not to imagine what magnificent things you could have done together, what feelings you’d share, what memories you’d forge. And then it’s hard not to feel the loss of things that weren’t. Things that will never be because the bud was nipped. The crickets silenced. No flower allowed to grow.
But the crickets of my mind continue regardless, a celebration that I’ve made it another day. They care not for loss, or living forever; they carry on because it is all they can do. And I wish them to never go silent.
Chirp.
Chirp.
Styles Yugen, signing off.