A firefly lives for about a year, yet we only glimpse its glow for three to seven days as an adult. After that, the light goes out and life ends. That short window is what we remember.
Wait. Think. Keep Going.
Last April, I saw fireflies for the first time.
Three of us drove two hours in the middle of the night to catch the “final show.” We parked, then walked a narrow country lane crowded with people heading back. Strangers joked that the fireflies had clocked out already.
The road was dark, and the sleepiness made me impatient. My partner kept soothing me—“Almost there, just a bit more.” Halfway in, turning back felt pointless, so we pushed on.
A few stray sparks floated toward us, passing the baton from my fatigue to excitement. I gripped his hand and urged him to hurry, afraid the fireflies really had gone home.
Voices drifted from somewhere ahead, but the flickers vanished, replaced by a wall of black. I worried the forest was now only the sound of a crowd dispersing. I sped up, slipped past a stand of bamboo, and suddenly the darkness opened.
I wish I could summon some perfect phrase for what I saw, but no adjective lands. The scene simply was, beyond anything I could dress up.
It felt like everything has a script, a mission to perform before dissolving back into time. Fireflies spend all their stored energy on flight, courtship, and light. Once mating and egg, laying end, so does their energy and their life.
But what about us?
No one hands us a mission, yet we obsess over “why.” My answer, for now, is that chasing a mission is the mission itself. You can wait to be assigned one, or you can write your own.
As we left, my partner nudged my shoulder.
“Worth bringing you here?”
“Yes. I’m glad we came.”
Keep Walking with the Light
It took me three dragging months to finish embroidering this piece. Creating hurts. Making it hurts. Finishing it hurts even more. We change too quickly; today’s me is not yesterday’s me. So with every piece, I end up arguing with a different version of myself.
More details about this art piece, [Click here]
