sounds of insects

I've been sitting in the sun outside reading a sci-fi book called the Golden Compass. It's the first in a trilogy. My friend in Brooklyn sent them to me for Christmas, which was really sweet.

So, I've been sitting out in mom's backyard in a green, plastic chair, reading and hoping the sun will coax some color back into my cheeks which have gone sickly pale over the fall. If Florida is good for anything, it's good for a jolt to the tan in the middle of winter.

I sit out there and close my eyes and I am completely dislocated. There are dry, reedy sounding crickets, some on the ground, some in the trees. The sound comes from above and below -- long and uninterrupted, or staccato and rhythmic. So familiar, the only thing I miss from the South, the sounds. And these are just the winter sounds in Florida, a one percent share of the total. In summer? Cicadas, tree frogs, bullfrogs, a million different crickets, a million different birds. It was a constant, throbbing sound that I never thought would leave my head. As a child, I would lay in bed at night and ride those sounds and wonder if they really did come from the woods around my house or whether they were actually coming out of my body, from somewhere deep between my ears.

Now, sitting at mom's, it's hot out, humid, there's a breeze, the crickets are singing. This could be any time of my life before I left the South. I close my eyes and I don't know when or where I am. Am I twelve again, at the house in North Carolina? Am I nine, at my Dad's for the summer? Am I five, in the apartments in South Carolina? Am I in high-school? It feels the same, that visceral flash, like a time-tunnel, I'm sucked back in.

It is pleasant and disorienting. I am glad to live so far away, in an entirely new climate and geography, so that these moments are like vacations within vacations. Enjoyable because temporary. Living down here again, I'm afraid I would be bound to this permanent dislocation, paralyzed and suffocated by it.