Friday, September 21, 2012

The Fly Entourage (Revised)

 
This is an auto-biographical piece I wrote a couple years ago during a serious bout with depression.  I found it in a notebook this morning when I was getting ready to go on a bike ride to my local coffee shop and write a letter with some coffee and breakfast. I read it and I felt it was a gift I had found it.  When one is in such a dark place there is no describing it to anyone.  Sometimes even yourself. I know a lot of people have or do suffer from similar things or are even on the road to recovery.  I thought I would share this as I recover and see the sun brightly at the end of the tunnel.  I know there may be times when I need to look back and read this, knowing I found some way to write down a description.  If I was able to do that, I know I had strength I was not aware of which is a miracle.  The real miracle, though, is we all have that inside us and maybe this will remind us all of that.  (I have revised it slightly compared to the one I found already posted on my blog. The slight difference is something maybe only I find interesting but maybe you will too.)



The flies were fat and slow as they buzzed and hopped seemingly everywhere the woman chose to put each part of her body.  They buzzed slowly past her ear and sh could almost decipher what they were going on about as she wiggled her fingers constantly to shoo them away.  In fact, it seemed, they would have landed on her eyes if it were possible.  Even if this were possible, today they would have had only room to peer through the slits her eyes had become.

She peered back at them, the flies’ kaleidoscope of vision seeing only a rainbow of dents, dings and slippage in her normally bright soul. If the fly blinked, which they rapidly did, it would create a fantastic slide show of what was stuck in her throat, sinking her hear and creating a slow anesthetic around her otherwise compulsive optimism.

It was beautifully horrible and just the thing a fly would enjoy.

It was for this reason each of her co-workers, family members and a few acquaintances secretly were happy to see her.  No one said anything about it to each other.  It was not something that came up on the phone, over coffee or as a subject in a sentence starting with, “Didja’ happen to notice?” No, it was a strange and no one mentioned it in polite company. 

The woman smelled of spiced oranges with luxurious dark hair that grew with the seasons as they changed.  Thus, the fly entourage had no explanation to the naked eye or even the human eye.  To the fat fly’s eye, who fed on garbage and mated with the discarded, the cinematic kaleidoscope they saw in the woman’s eyes was dinner and an ever rotating porn flick.

In such mundane moments as when the lights went off at night or when she lifted cream soup to her mouth and blew on it, people did wonder why the woman didn’t do anything about it.  On the other hand, maybe she was working so hard to do something this was the minimal amount of flies she could keep from invading her space at a time.  Maybe if she did nothing at all, she would be lost inside a cloud of flies  and meet an unfortunate end from the task of pest control chemicals so strong she couldn’t breathe anymore. When the cloud cleared and they back to clean up the fly carcasses they would find her bloated body covered in flies like family weeping over her in still-life, kissing her eyes.

No one thought about it for long.  Even the strangest of things become less so the longer they are a part of your life. They develop a purpose.  The woman and the Fly Entourage were no different.  The flies had been around her since she was three and yes, she had spent increasing efforts to deter them until it consumed her life and there was room for nothing as a result of even the few flies remaining by the third decade of her life.

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