I Should Have Freed You
I face a decision: whether I will continue to watch him struggle or rescue him from his overindulgence and impulsive decision-making. He looks pathetic yet pitiable floundering at the bottom of my water glass, like the drunken biker who toppled onto the sidewalk as I passed him on Esplanade Avenue an hour earlier while walking to find a Dr. Pepper. The biker was flushed, completely confused about the chain of events that preceded his accident and didn’t thank me after I helped him to his feet. Watch out for potholes. These New Orleans roads are no joke, I offered. He nodded and rode off. I exhausted my compassion for the evening. The biker was similarly squat and segmented like the fly, his belt separating his pot-belly from his tapering, thin legs.
I recognize I am getting carried away anthropomorphizing this house fly that tragically fell into my glass but there’s little else to occupy my time. Everyone else has retired to their bedrooms or studios. I don’t want to read. I don’t want to call or text anyone. I want to sit and think because thinking about my inaction prevents me from taking action, from making a comparable mistake and suffering an unfortunate fate—drowning in the last dregs of raspberry electrolyte water, or some metaphoric parallel.
Are flies sexually dimorphic? I wonder and lean forward in my patio chair to inspect the fly. I feel nauseous watching its legs twitch, making the shallow film of water vibrate and ripple. I cannot tell whether it has wide or narrow eye placement, which seems to be the easiest method to determine the insect’s gender. I compare the fly to images on my phone and decide I can identify an ovipositor, a pale, elongated appendage at the end of its abdomen; the fly is a female. Or at least I believe it’s female from my amateur assessment.
That’s unconscious bias, I suppose. I prefer to believe the fly is male because it was a nuisance, landing on my neck and hovering around my baked tilapia as I tried to eat on the porch. It shuffled around the rim of my glass despite my repeated attempts to shoo it by half-heartedly waving my hand. A second fly joined. His girlfriend, I thought warmly, expanding my fantasy. But she didn’t make the same mistake. She flitted away and circled the Joan Mitchell Center’s resident cat Yin-Yang, a calico cat who emerges around meal times to beg for scraps and nap on the cushioned patio chairs. He had brown gashes across his neck, evidence of a nasty street fight, and the fly must have found the flaky, eroding scab’s sweetness more intriguing.
I should simply empty the glass. I could stand up, tip the contents onto the garden bordering the deck, and allow the fly to recover on the mulch bed. Sometimes I think I admire people who are principled about the sanctity of life, extending their empathy to pests that most people have no qualms dispatching. My first boyfriend was this type. He once captured a spider with a wine glass and an unopened bill and carried it down three flights of stairs to release it in the alleyway.
My boyfriend and I went to a poetry reading at Women & Children First one evening and returned to my studio apartment afterward. We made out on my yellow-pinstripe armchair, which separated my kitchen and my bedroom space. I straddled him in my green wool paints and briefly leaned backward, smiled at him, and noticed a cockroach nymph scurrying up the wall. I squished it with my thumb as if I was pressing a tack into the drywall to hang a postcard. My boyfriend was disgusted and chastised me. All life is sacred, he argued. Fuck off.
We broke up shortly after. Well, more truthfully, I stopped responding to his text messages when I left to study abroad in France for two weeks. I was unable to make a decision, perhaps scared to hurt him and realize I have the capacity to cause someone else pain, or reluctant to remove the possibility of our romance entirely, preferring to remain in this question: what might still happen between us? Like leaving my bedroom window open during a storm, wanting the fresh breeze and knowing the rain will flood the windowsill, drenching the books I keep there. I wrote a poem where I used the cockroach as an inexact metaphor for our brief and unpleasant relationship and gave it to him as a gift. I laugh as I recall this memory. I am the same writer, the same person, even after all these years; my ambivalence betrays a heartlessness and willingness to be the victim of others’ actions. A character flaw with no obvious solution.
The evening is ending. The sky is periwinkle and bisected by a faint rainbow. It never rained. A faint mist descended from the clouds for half an hour. I take out my phone and reflexively take a photo as if I am lovesick, documenting anything beautiful I encounter so I might share it with him later. Jazz music echoes from the yard of a neighboring house. There is a wedding next door every weekend, one of the residents explained. The disgraced former executive director of the foundation who established the residency used to live in that house. Someone tells me a rumor that she still lives there, that the residency staff planted the stalks of towering bamboo at the edges of the property to prevent her from peering over the fence. I understand her need for proximity, a masochistic voyeurism motivated by her reluctance to let life continue without her involvement, no matter how insignificant she becomes or how painful this act of witnessing.
Esplanade Ave is crowded with inebriated people leaving the Fair Grounds Race Course and ambling their way toward the French Quarter, likely filtering into the closest bar with open space. Pedicab drivers cycle back and forth, persuading concertgoers to pay for a ride to their next destination. I decide I should go to sleep. I have an early flight. I stand up and reach for the glass. The fly is gone. He freed himself.
Image: Alice Neel, Gouray, circa 1947.