Insect Savior Complex

As a boy, I spent a lot of time wandering the elementary school tarmac freeing insects from spiderwebs. Crouching down with my face in hedges. Navigating the the poles of the playground. Searching underneath empty benches. I unwrapped flies, ladybugs, and leafbugs from their silk coffins and watched them buzz away. I don’t know why. I wasn’t a sensitive child by any means. In fact, I was quite cruel.

My hands—sticky and coated in dirt. Hair frizzed and tangled. Teeth—gapped daggers. I had lice twice and blamed it on Valerie, the most hated girl in class. She smelled like spit and was arrogant about her role in choir. I teased Todd relentlessly. The boy who ate boogers in public. One time I teased him until he cried, and when the teacher came I pretended not to know why he was sobbing. Once, in what I now believe was a pre-pubescent infatuation, I grabbed a boy named Daniel from behind and threw him into the ground. I gave him a concussion.

Like I said, I was not a sensitive child.

Still, I spent those lullsome afternoons secretly wandering the sun-scorched asphalt. The abstract idea of some hidden, helpless, little creatures pleading for salvation, haunting the air with invisible screams, suffocating in silk straightjackets, begging with all their might to be noticed—it frightened me. I wasn’t afraid of spiders, and I wasn’t afraid of bugs, but the relationship between them always made me run cold.

Usually they were already dead. I pitied their corpses. Dug holes in patches of dirt to bury them. Found rocks to serve as their tombstones. Sometimes, after looking both ways to make sure no one was nearby, I whispered eulogies. Bowed my forehead to the boiling black asphalt. Dry heat. Chapped lips. I kissed the dirt and imagined it was the forehead of a dead friend’s body.

The first insect I ever found alive was a ladybug. Caught in a tattered web that looked like frayed fabric. She writhed and flickered and twitched and begged. I wondered if her blood might boil. If bugs ever got thirsty. I tore her out with my fingernails and smiled as she flew away.

I looked back down at the web. It shifted in the breeze. I whispered “I’m sorry.”

I imagined a spider coming home, exhausted after a long day. I imagined how disappointed she’d be when she walked through the front door and found her dinner had abandoned her.

“I’m sorry.” I said it again. Louder. And hoped that, wherever the spider was, maybe she might hear me.

Then, as if I were a criminal fleeing the scene of a crime, I ran. I ran as if someone were chasing me. As if humiliated by the prospect of explaining what I had just done. I ran. From the unbearable disappointment that weighs down a spider’s face. I ran. Like a terrified child bolts home after witnessing something unspeakable. I ran. As if I were terrified of whatever punishment might catch me. Until my legs burned, and my throat cracked, and other people were around. Until I burst into the cool of an air-conditioned classroom and let it wash me clean. Panting. Wheezing. Safe. Some coach from the after-school program asked me where I had been. I cracked open a carton of milk and chugged it like a beer.

“Nowhere. I was nowhere.”

We waited patiently for my mother to get off work. Pick me up. Take me home. The sun set in the meantime. I sipped my milk. I was always the last kid there. The coaches always tapped their feet. I felt guilty. The clock ticked noisily.

To fill the silence, we played board games—ones like Connect Four and Chess and Sorry—over and over and over again. All throughout, I tried to make the coaches laugh. It was hard. Children usually aren’t funny when they’re trying. The coaches only laughed when I talked about the other children. The booger eaters and the crybabies and the ugly ducklings. They laughed when I was sassy and subversive and politely unkind. When I showed them I knew how to Shoot the shit.

In those interminable hours, as we waited for my mother to pick me up and restarted the board games and gossiped about which third grader was dating which—a spider’s stomach panged as it slept without dinner, and a ladybug rushed home, frightful and eager, confounded by and apprehensive towards the inappropriateness of its own existence.

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