Ways in which I am unlike a bug

I do not breed rapidly. At the end of the day, I still haven’t learned to fly: neither truly, nor directly. I have no prehistoric emergency parachute to speak of. Try as I might, I cannot wrestle my sworn enemies with the power of my otherwise useless jaws alone. My body is neither simple, nor repetitive. I will never exceed 7 feet in length, nor curl and bend myself into the smallest head of a small pin: there is nothing miraculous about my capacity for size. I cannot recall the oxygen-rich days of the Carboniferous period, what it felt like to grow and grow as if all growing were comprised of abundance itself, my body safely held, as it would have been, by the presence of air passing easily through my innermost organs and keeping me radically alive.

Ways in which I am quite like a bug after all

I, too, am not so organically ordered, despite the assertive long-term efforts of men wielding educated labels in the name of taxonomy & reason. My body, at least on some days, completely ends in my abdomen. My eyes are obvious, source of all glances and looking. I live my life with sensory appendages coming out from and going into my head. I do the following things: run, crawl, scurry, climb, skitter. I also do the following: buzz, zoom, rattle, hiss, hum. Watching me in my natural state, you might assume that different parts of my body each have their own singular brain. Regardless of biology’s firm explanation otherwise, I do keep all my softest parts on the inside. There are so many known versions of me—too many to count, a befuddling number. And there are many, many more yet to be discovered, but still I know about them, the safe promise of their existence. Despite a handful of iterations of personal extinction, I continue to live—no, thrive—alongside humanity. It is not that I don’t evolve: it is that I become better and better at being exactly what I already am.

Photograph of bee by Sarah Cook