icarian fly

it wanted itself to death

a fly is hitting the wall, and then the window, and then the wall again. i am busy pretending like i don’t exist, and this bug won’t stop interrupting me with its own tortured existence. 

YOU CAME IN HERE FLY. YOU. CHOSE THIS.

it won’t understand that. all it understands is freedom, and the opposite of freedom. it came into my room, tempted by something that must have been very beautiful or very promising because it is willing to die for it (it will die for it). or maybe it never thought of what might happen, drawn in only by the sheer allure of the mysterious thing. it came in here, tempted purely by the glow of something that doesn’t exist, and in reaching for the sun has found itself incinerated. icarian fly. 

it is buzzing like a weed-whacker. it doesn’t understand that glass is glass, and it will get cut sooner or later. the fly is on this side, its freedom on that side. my door is wide open, but all it can see is the world through the pane.

icarian fly is killing itself.

its big black body pings off of the mirror on my closet door, then my window, then my wall, then the mirror again. i lay down to nap, and it crawls inside my mouth as i sleep. it knows that anything is better than the window, the wall, the mirror, the window the wall the mirror thewindowthewallthemirrorthe

it is so desperate to escape that soon enough, its own efforts will kill it. it has already flown far too close to the beautiful nothing, the mirage temptress. it is trapped. the cremation has begun. 

tonight, i will come back and see its little pile of ashy remains on my windowsill, still gazing out at its impossible freedom. i will look at its corpse, and i will shake my head. simply too bad. i will leave its body there for months, too afraid or too lazy to touch it. curled, delicate, husk-like. it has charred itself to nothing, burned itself out like a candle. it lit its own burial pyre before it even died.

icarian fly wanted itself to death. 

goodbye icarian fly.

author’s note:

this isn’t really what i usually post, but i wrote it this afternoon and enjoyed writing it and i think there’s a stigma around only posting one’s very best and deepest work on here, and sometimes i just want to post silly little mini essays about a dying fly’s hubris.