Sweaters, death
“Your sweater smells like the subway.”
“Well, I had leant it to a friend. But it’s clean.”
“Well your friend smells like the subway.”
When I was six, the subway was a mystical place that represented my future urban existence; I loved it, but still recognized its smell as a fetid combination of must, metal, rat poop and stale urine, the delicious fragrance of a city. But I think my sweater smells fine. You can’t let six-year-olds get you down.
Tonight we saw a moth outside the kitchen window. It beat its wings imploringly against the glass, begging to enter. Nine-year-old I. started lamenting its fate. “Why can’t we let it in?” she asked me. “It’s cold and it’s going to die.”
“True,” I answered, “but if we let it in, it’ll eat all our sweaters.” (Though I guess it doesn’t matter much, since they apparently smell like the subway.) It was a Darwinist moment, though. Survival of the biggest? Survival of those who own sweaters? I felt genuinely terrible about leaving this moth outside to die. The worst part was how we watched it — beating, collapsing, beating, collapsing — and even took photos until we could no longer see its heart-shaped body through the glass.
This is not how life is, I wanted to explain. When life gets hard and we need help, there will be people who will help us. I truly believe this.
Instead I said nothing, and we ate ice cream and wrote stories about blue chocolate. The moth was dismissed, but not forgotten. I really have to stop interpreting every phenomenon of nature as a philosophical metaphor.