Think about the life of a fruit fly. A nuisance made out of filth. Rotted fruit cores browning and molding tiny pests that zap past your ear in the middle of a dream, shaking you suddenly awake. Google them and you will learn their more common name, the vinegar fly. Yet a sugar, vinegar and dish soap concoction is the deadliest trap. The sugary vinegar catches their attention while the soap pins them down. Delicate 2.5 mm wings engulfed in Dawn blue muck, swimming to their bitter end.

They took over my apartment during a heatwave in August. Some crawling out of my sink like a birth canal, others squeezing through the mesh of my bathroom window after escaping the neglected dog feces that sat right outside on the back alleyway slab. Created by the neighbor’s three dogs left unattended to bark and crap for hours. A few even seeped out of my trash bags that had started to rot. I tried my best to keep up with the dishes, but they were always three steps ahead of me. Ironically, my neighbors leaving the dog dirt also gave me false permission to ignore my own filth. Vinegar cups planted all over with a slight sting in their odor, hosted dozens of dead fruit flies. Yet they persisted. Their constant presence mocked me, criticized my cleaning habits and added torment to an already fogged mind. I didn’t care as much about my well being as I cared about these unwelcomed guests. If I wasn’t so intent on ridding them from existence, I should have thanked them for getting me out of bed.

Relationships have born out of my own rot. Pests that sniff out humans in molding condition. Leeching onto them to feel better, to take advantage. To suck the sap until you’re left dry and tell you that you’re not dating, you’re just hanging out. As if driving him to the hospital daily to see his father was a casual task. Or allowing him permission of my body. Taking my lovesick heart and obliterating it in his hand. Connected tissue slipping between his fingers like popped pillsbury can, bloodstains everywhere and fibers dug deep under his fingernails.

You kept returning to my dreams. Reoccurring like a nightmare, a peek into what once upon a time I wished for. For us. I had tried to abandon the thought while my brain held onto it as a keepsake. The vinegar flies. Every fantasy amplified in dreamland, feeling like a second life. An alternate universe where we’re together and every obstacle from the real world doesn’t exist. Like my insecurities around my existence, around my stuttered words when I stand near you and sweat, or my inability to tell you how badly I wanted you. Convinced that there was no way your eyes ever looked at me that way. But my dreams were teased regardless.

Everyone kept whispering in my ear, telling me what a couple we would make. As if I hadn’t already thought about it. Extensively. Just tell him they kept telling me, a spinning thought continually circling at the forefront of my mind. It sat on my forehead like ill-cut bangs. He wore a blue shirt to match you Lilly snuck into conversation at a party we attended. It is true that he did know what color I would wear. I was trying not to think of it until it was spoken out loud. The picture of us from that night hangs around..

At one point, I swore my thoughts were too loud as we sat too closely at the bar that night. Maybe that’s what was held on to, not my own thoughts, but the words from other’s mouths that slipped past my eardrums straight to my circadian rhythm. Creating their own worlds.

But that one night, that moment at the bar and the dangerously close, inebriated flirting. The sizzle that consumed me. Dancing at 4am on Main Street and body language too close for friends.

And an almost kiss that I would swear on the stars I saw.

I love you as a friend, a message I’ll later receive.

.

A dandelion can grow through concrete. Tiny sun ray petals sprout from a strong hollow stem that’s tall and proud. It doesn’t understand how magical it is to see a flower burst through such man-made convenience, while it is often snided as a weed. Yet the size of the crack isn’t what allowed the flower to grow. Dandelions can make the crack expand to fit what it needs. I’m not a weed runs through my head whenever I stumble across them, laying my body down on the ground and soaking them in sideways. Pebbles impress the side of my face as I stare in awe. Poor Alice, tulips are much too catty anyways.

There was a time I too crawled out from a crack in the pavement. A new city and my pre-adult life jam packed into a 92 Mercury. Even the hamper couldn’t stay closed, stuffed with clothes and embedded fragile figurines. Precious moments that were never a gift I asked for, my catholic guilt too strong to ever say anything. It will be almost two decades later when I can finally part with them, and only to a “good home”. Forging my way, a brand new being in this space, adapting to my surroundings and burrowing. Oscillating between worlds, the very privileged and the bottom. Trying to get an education while smelling of diesel fuel, surrounded by those who either didn’t need a third job to help, or the advantages of a library being accessible 24 hours with comfy chairs in the basement to sleep on.

Or the time I stayed too long with you in your smoke stained apartment. A mattress on the floor and ash everywhere. Two sad, lonely people too unaware of how much the hurt held them together. The sorrow and cigarettes reminded me of grandmom and I couldn’t stop trying to fix you. I sunk deeper into your gravitational pull the longer I stayed. Like the night I couldn’t find you because you passed out on the curb. Or the night everyone did so much coke, noses bled. Until that last night, the last try, when you screamed at me I am not your problem anymore. But that is not what I grew up being told about love and this is a common theme.

Scent is directly linked to memory, the olfactory both storing and being made of memories. Like how the combination of Chanel #5 and smoke from Pall Mall non filtered cigarettes transports me to Grandmom’s house in the summer. The better parts of my childhood happened there. We watched Grandmom’s shows, played word games and ate too much Special K. Many afternoons spent laying next to her, cuddling under the mustard yellow blanket with cigarette holes, watching Murder She Wrote and Matlock with no regard for secondhand smoke and a child. Grandpop left her abruptly one day while she was sick in the hospital. A detail she never let go of, even on her deathbed. There’s still a jacket that lives in my closet with faint hints of her odor, holding on for dear life, tangled in the fabric. Occasionally I stick my face in there, squeeze and overwhelm myself with nostalgia.

There is also still her voice in my head telling me to never depend on a man.

Butterflies remember lessons learned from when they were a caterpillar. Their nervous system is hard wired as the caterpillar ingests itself. Dissolving, disintegrating, oozing. Breaking itself apart piece by piece, morsel by morsel. Eventually evolving into veined membrane worm kites, gently gliding through air, contorting their bodies like belly dancers to move their wings rhythmically. For them, all of this is natural. To learn, breakdown and regenerate. To us, we marvel in their grandeur. Assigning symbolism and beauty to their short existence.

I think about the possibility that sleep cocoons our brain. Processing, moving, cross-wiring. Trying to file away the day. Oozing. We wake up groggy from the reformation of our consciousness. A caterpillar goo turned cerebrum with previous lessons still attached. Yet so is everything else. The grime, the muck and the sludge of our habitat. The wisdom we hold never truly spreads its wings.

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