nixsight

We’re walking the dog. It’s one of those unreliably sunny days we seem to be having a lot of, this May. The sun is shining, but any thoughts of seasonal stability are blown away by the bluster of the wind, the rattling rush of it through the trees and long grass.

I look over at her… her attention is off in the middle distance somewhere, like it so often is, and she doesn’t look back. She’s so beautiful, and yet it’s hard not to worry when she is off away like this, pensive and restrained. I’ve been around. Nearly every conversation we have, I’ve had a version of with someone else before… every silly little system crash of mine I get a sharp pang of recognition, every crazy little quirk of hers, it’s unnervingly familiar. With however many billion people there are on the planet, and the combinations of them all buzzing around, all down the years, every iteration of every row and kiss and joke we share has been done somewhere before.

And at the same time, because she isn’t the same as all the others, and I am not the same as all the others, at the same time as being so painfully typical, it’s different. All at once, it’s different and the same.

A buzzing, swooping bug drifts crazily into view… I notice them more since getting the dog. Her only real stab at alertness and competence is the ability to catch a critter out of the air with no apparent warning or preamble, so these days I have to spot them first, and distract her. A swallowed wasp or bumblebee could spell an expensive trip to canine casualty. I choose caution.

This doesn’t carry the familiar yellow and black stripes of danger, though. In fact, it doesn’t look much like anything at all. It has the feel of a cricket, but I’ve never seen one in person, so I’m only guessing. It’s got bright red wings, round like a ladybird’s, flapping lazily like washing on a line. It’s body is stretched and spindly, legs dangling free, for all the world like a tiny man hanging from a tinier crimson parachute.

I’ve never seen a bug like it. She’s good with nature, so I draw her attention it’s way, but she doesn’t know what it is either.

We talk about the strange insect for a little while. I suggest that, maybe with their compressed lifespans and massive numbers, species of bugs might evolve and devolve and become extinct so quickly, and we’d never know about it. That if species of creature that have been around for thousands and millions of years are only now being discovered in the hardest to reach parts of the world, wouldn’t it be possible that these smallest of beasts might evade notice in the mundane places, where etymologists might never look….

Privately I become quite preoccupied with this thought. What if we so seldom see anything new that we just assume that we never will? Assume that we just don’t know enough about bugs? What if truly exceptional breeds of creature are born and die under our noses all the time, and we never think to notice? That if it was worth noticing, someone would have noticed it already…?

Iterations of the same type, so similar that they go unnurtured and uncelebrated, but different enough to die out?

Versions of the same sort of thought haunt me sometimes, maybe familiar enough that I don’t see the need to address them, but maybe I should.

My thoughts are interrupted when the dog notices the bug, and hounds it into the undergrowth, maybe to kill it off, maybe to get distracted by some other shiny, flittering thing. She clearly can’t tell a difference between this bug and any other.

We walk on.