 |
| from GHOST BOX |
The first time the cicadas came, I was 16. It was also the summer of fighting endlessly with my mother and shiny new driver's licenses. Of boxes full of kittens and heat waves that knocked out the power on the regular. I spent a week at a camp during June in the woods, where we picnicked in a grove in Lake Geneva with husks thick on the ground and cicadas flying into the potato salad. Later, an older boy would clumsily kiss me for the first time behind a boat house along the lake where I was certain hockey-masked serial killers watched from the woods. He had belonged to someone else the summer before, and would never belong to me, but it perhaps set a pattern in motion.
The second time the cicadas came, I was in my early 30s. I'd fallen in love the previous fall with someone who was, unbeknownst to me, secretly married. After a fit of anger and no-contact over the holidays, I had fallen back into it that spring, becoming somehow, the "other woman" so often reviled. The draw was that he was fun and good in bed, and would be among a slew of bad romantic choices in my early 30s. I was poly and had practiced ethical nonmonogamy for years, but this was highly unethical and not my finest moment. He was very normal and suburban and not at all like anyone I'd slept with before. But he had a wickedly lovely sense of humor, He was also possibly the first person, in the early days, I could see myself existing happily with forever. Which up to then had never been true of any partner prior.
I sometimes say that particular situationship was the root of much wanton behavior in my 30s as a result, but it's not fair to blame it entirely. Later, he would turn out to be a compulsive liar and wound up in jail for a bit for white-collar crimes, during which we exchanged long multi-page letters I scented with pear perfume as if it were all so normal. I highly suspected it was some sort of game between him and his wife. He would cheat and she would catch him and then he'd cheat again. A cycle that went on over decades until they eventually divorced. Over the next several years we would drift and reconnect, sometimes through my volition, sometimes his. That summer, visiting a zoo in the suburbs with my parents, the racket of cicadas was so loud we couldn't hear ourselves speak. One would fly down my dress and may have shaved years off my life, its wings thrumming against my chest for a second outside the aviary.
The lifespan of cicadas is fascinating and slow. The steady burrowing under ground for 17 years. The few days topside. The molting and the screaming. The mating and the inevitable death. The intervals feel like check-in points. Between the 16 and 33, I did many things like go to grad school, write poems and books, move several times. There would be apartments and more cats and other brief or long entanglements. Between 33 and 50, even more, including reviving and re-animating the corpse that long dead love 6 years after it had ended in one of many angry e-mail exchanges in which his wife accused me of all sorts of things that were mostly true. More than anyone, he appears in poems every once in a while. Sometimes, he is a hybrid monster with other men who have drifted in and out of my romantic life over the years. He doesn't deserve it. But it happens.
I realized the other day that 17 years from now, and luck willing, I will be in my late 60s. Another 17 and I will be in my early 80s if I make it.. This go round, I likely won't see much of them thankfully, the trees having been planted and replaced many times in Edgewater due to parasites and beetles. Nothing gets a root in, much less cicadas. The ground turned and returned with each new planting. It's kind of like the city itself, always changing. Buildings come down and rise again. 150 year-old houses disappear over night.
I could say, I too emerge and re-emerge new every 17 years. As J and I make wedding plans for next summer, despite us both considering ourselves poly and my vow to never marry (I also vowed tattoos were too permanent and now have several, so take that as you may) , I am in many ways not the 16 year old girl with blonde curls always fighting over laundry and dishes kissing the wrong boys. I am also not the younger woman who mistook forbidden fruit for something like love. I am something wholly new but with all those things rattling inside her.
