Time Flies By
Memories of a Very Long Day
He lay, exhausted but content, surrounded by thousands of his closest family.
It had been a good life, a long life, a life filled with purpose, adventure and laughter and, now, sweet memories.
He could still feel how it hit him when he had seen her first; wings fluttering flirtatiously in the morning breeze, six long legs all the way up to her thorax.
Her pheromones filled his head and he dove on the moment, spreading her wings and giving her ovipositor the time of its life. They had spent thirty glorious minutes together; the best half an hour of his life before she flew off to find a pile of dogshit on which to hatch their children. They lay together, they rolled around and they talked. They talked until the morning dew had disappeared and the sun beat fiercely on the pond’s surface.
He had never seen her again after that morning but he had seen his children. ‘Deadbeat dad’ they had called him. Thousands of accusatory faces, thousands of angry questions.
‘Why weren’t you there for us?’
‘Why didn’t you make it work?’
‘Don’t you love us?’
How could he explain love and loss to those who had never experienced it? How could he justify a broken home to the very ones whose hearts were broken too?
It had taken hours to fix their relationship. Hours of difficult admissions and painful reflections. He could justify everything he had done and all the things he had failed to do but he knew this wasn’t the time. His children needed him to own their heartache. His children needed their dad.
Over time they built a relationship built on trust, and forgiveness, and laughter. Oh, how they laughed. They wheeled and buzzed through still meadow air. From the pounding heat of the mid afternoon sun to the refreshing cool of a late dusk. Hours spent feasting on algea and the rotting corpses of dead insects laying on the ground. Hours of talking about their pasts, their futures and the joy they found in each other. Hours of laughter.
As the sun finally set and light lost its daily battle with darkness he felt his wings weaken. He slowed and stuttered like an engine that has run out of fumes to run on and settled clumsily on a nearby cherry blossom.
His children cried but he did not. When he was busy living he hadn’t had time to audit his life, but now, in his final seconds he had all the time in the world. He had loved he had lost and he had loved again. He had laughed.
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