my life as a moth // sophie Höss
I make a left-hand turn. I miss the street I’m looking for. I make a left-hand turn.
Repeat.
I go through each day waiting for something terrible to happen to me. I don’t believe this is some sort of neurosis—OCD has split my skull for a lifetime, and I recognize all its disguises, down to the slyest of shoulder taps. But this feeling—I can’t describe or name it beyond a sort of resigned expectation; an appointment I didn’t schedule, but I know has been booked in my name.
I don’t believe in God, but I believe in my Nana, who over and over proves her impossibility. When I say I’m talking to God, I’m talking to her.
I want to know the hour and date I am expected to appear, and when the time comes, to knock. But I guess that defeats the purpose. Hamlet says, “words, words, words.” I agree.
Even dredged from a well of truth, there is nothing particularly honest about what I do here. I should never be trusted not to make a Faustian pact.
I used to pray wildly for all manner of misfortune to fall on me, for it to happen to me instead of someone who deserved it less. I take it back, I say now when I remember this, I take it back, I take it back. Nana expected this. She knows me and my selfishness better than anyone.
Something is wrong somewhere in my body. There is no pain, no physical evidence I can pinpoint. But I feel that somewhere in the haystack of my skin and flesh and organs, there is a sharpening needle.
If words were a fluorescent bulb and I were a moth, I would fling myself into the false heat until my wings sizzled off and I metamorphosed from an alive insect into a dead one. The floorboard—rotted soft—gives way underfoot, and my ankle emerges un-splintered. I crouch and look into the hole left behind. There’s a worm and an eye, in no particular order.
Wind moves the leaves, and so does the light. The doorframe wobbles. I’m expecting a visitor. I wait.
Wait.
I drive my Nana’s old car. It’s not an old car at all, actually, because she only drove it for a few years before she died so young. I once heard that a family is never the same after it loses its matriarch. I haven’t dreamt about her in a long time.
I take my two Zoloft tablets and become concerned that I’ve already taken them earlier today and have just double-dosed myself. I leave the bathroom and step on a third tablet just outside the doorframe. It’s slightly damp, and the pale orange coating has eroded to white.
The dew on the chrysanthemums is a few degrees shy of frost. The petals quiver on the edge of that strange night, seemingly indifferent. But what do I know of flowers?
This might be the symptom that precedes becoming unstuck in time. If so: I want to see the way my parents looked at me when I was born; I want to see the way I looked at them. I want to get the dying over with. I want it to happen again and again until it loses all meaning, all mystery—a silent little eternity not unlike any other. Repeat. Repeat. I want never to speak a cruel word to my brother. I want to make friends on the playground. I want to rewrite the first story I ever wrote. I want to make it worse. I want to sit at my Nana’s bedside for a thousand last times, and when she asks if I’ll remember her, I will know the answer is yes.
Moths are born on borrowed time. It’s all a countdown until they first encounter a lamp. My life began the day I learned to read. It ended the day I learned to write. I have no delusions about perfection, but I won’t say I have no delusions.
I tell myself stories on the highway at night. The black, black road is the River Styx, and I am the ferryman. The wind is my passenger.
I write a terrible poem. I chew it up. I swallow.
Repeat.
At a dinner party, words spill from the open gash in my stomach, and I scramble to pick them up. It’s embarrassing for everyone involved.
Maybe I should say how I really feel. Or maybe I’ll just continue to say that my heart is on the wrong side of my chest; that breathing is less like breathing and more like a series of reflexive prayers; that in my head, there is a small winter burning.
Sophie Höss is a New York writer who loves the ocean and is in bed by 9 pm every night. She has received a Pushcart Prize and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Microfiction. She was a semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize, and her words are scattered around in BOMB, The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review, The Southampton Review, Wigleaf, Split Lip, and elsewhere. Also, she has a small dog named Elmo who likes to wear little sweaters. You can read more of her work at sophiehosswriting.com.