Sad Splat

Was tooling down 280 North, headed towards the city at the speed of traffic, with j-pop on the car stereo and a welcome stillness in my thoughts. I catch sight of a pair of moths fluttering in the distance, a courting pair. (Hey, insects court too, didn't ya know...) We normally think of attraction and affection in the context of higher species; these soft-bodied invertebrates may not be capable of feeling much in the way of emotions, but on some level, the expression of that fundamental instinct is instantly recognizable. They strayed not more than an inch from each other, fluttering along in an erratic, meandering aerial dance, following one another, seeming not to know who was leading whom, or where they were headed; insignificant details, regardless. They were perhaps a hundred feet away or so... a distance closed very, very quickly by a car on the freeway during off-peak traffic hours.

A moment later, a reddish-brown smear on the windshield is all that remains of one of them. And just one. I'm quite certain that one of the moths was pulverized by the passing of my car, and the other one was blown off in another direction by currents of air. In any event, there was only one smear. I'm not so cruel as to have deliberately aimed for them, mind you (and besides, that would have been one hell of a stupid way to die in an auto accident, losing control whilst trying to run over or dodge a pair of moths fluttering in the interstate breeze). I felt *really* bad about that... it would have been better to have missed them both. Failing that, it would have been better even to have pulverized them both painlessly on the windshield. The only way Romeo and Juliet could have been made even more tragic is if only one of them died, leaving the other to wallow and thrash in the dramatics of grief for who knows how long, screaming, wailing, bawling, and wracked with inconsolable loss. That Shakespearian tragedy may be the paradigmatic expression of romantic loss in our common socialization, but at bottom, it's still a story of romance first and grief second. No, the fact is - things can get a lot worse than that.

The wipers swish back and forth, accompanied by a spray of soapy cleaning solution as I twist the lever that promised to clean the mess off my windshield. Sorry about that, Romeo. Romeo's mashed innards are stubborn and refuse to leave the glass. Juliet by now is a quarter-mile behind me, fluttering alone in the breeze, mercifully lacking in the necessary memory and intellectual faculties to understand exactly what happened back there. Though moths are even more at the mercy of life and random happenstance than human beings are, they do at least have it easier in one respect... I don't doubt it's easier for them to forget.