So I was sitting on a bench yesterday late afternoon, and I looked over and saw some dragonflies (red ones) buzzing around and hanging out like they seem to like doing.
It occurred to me that half the time I think dragonflies are beautiful. They sit completely still like a statuette, with paper thin wings held out at rest. They’re built with impossible grace, thin bodies and huge eyes. Then they hover in mid-air somehow, just to show off, and then they take off faster than you can even follow them with your eyes. You know you’ll never catch one or kill one, and that seems to put them beyond the realm of what you have control over, beyond the concrete. They’re little bits of surreal that get as close to you as they want and disappear at will.
But then at other times, when I look close, dragonflies are kind of revolting. Scaly, huge ungainly heads, and eerily quick. Little demons. Have you ever found a dead one? So light like they’re not there, but scaly-greasy too. And then I think about what they look like to other bugs, and the name clicks–dragons. Huge, fast, deadly. Unstoppable. Red.
In my eyes dragonflies live on the borderland between beauty and horror. I want to think of beautiful and ugly as separated by a wide brown plain of mediocre, boring, plain worlds. Polar opposites. But these fairy-demons force me to acknowledge that there is a border between the two, and it’s small enough for a dragonfly to straddle.
It’s creatures like dragonflies, maybe, that make me look more closely at truth, and the sloppy ways I conceptualize an intricate world. Are there razor-thin boundaries between love and hate, with little people dancing across the lines? Good and evil, with all men strewn out on the balance beam?
I guess that makes me thankful for dragonflies.
