In the her essay “Fireflies,” from the May issue of The Spirit of Disruption, Aimee Nezhukumatathil weaves the lives of insects with her childhood. Specifically, she weaves the lives of different beetles with the memories they recall about her childhood family vacations. Her father, we learn in the second paragraph on page 59, “loved driving through the night to get to our destination to avoid the summer glare and heat.” This acts as a setup to the memory of one specific road trip where her father “knew to park our car away from the side” (59) of the road, and to “cover our one flashlight with a red bag, so as not to disturb the fireflies, and to only point it at the ground,” (59) which leads the reader into a rumination on life, death, and the space in between. For Nezhukumatathil, fireflies function as both metaphor and a vehicle for memory.
Nezhukumatathil’s use of fireflies and other beetles as a metaphor serves to illustrate how the actions of others have ripple effects. More simply, her use of fireflies is a metaphor for life. She explains an experiment that zoology professors performed in order to trick Indigo Buntings into “following a false star in a poorly lit classroom” (60). The purpose of experiment is unclear, but what is clear is that Indigo Buntings always know where true North is, regardless of the pressures of artificial forces. Fireflies, on the other hand, “are more easily deceived” (60), much like humans. Nezhukumatathil illustrates how fireflies more accurately reflect human lives when she states that “fireflies lose their light rhythm for a few minutes after only a single car’s headlights” (60). The daily life of a human is filled with distractions. Smartphones, tablets, emails, Slack messages, and social media act like headlines, creating distractions from the task at hand. That task can be work-related, or a conversation at the dinner table. It takes people time to refocus after each interruption, just like fireflies. To end there would be enough, but Nezhukumatathil poses an interesting question: “What gets lost, then, in the radio silence? What connections are translated wrong or missed entirely?” Though the question is philosophical, it serves to two functions: giving the reader pause, and to remind the reader of her family summer vacations. It’s during those summer vacations that her mother has “time to select our frilled nightclothes, laugh about the days’ sightseeing and various cheap trinkets” (59) Nezhukumatathil bought. In other words, during summer vacations, Nezhukumatathil was able to connect with her mother, uninterrupted, just as fireflies were once able to connect with each other without the distraction of artificial light.
The growing use of artificial light, and its ability to disrupt the rhythms of fireflies, works as a metaphor for post-vacation life, too. The end of vacation is alluded to in the first paragraph of the essay with “everyone ready to sleep in their own bed and be still,” (59), like the activity of vacation can be as exhausting as the activity of life. Spending concentrated time with family can be challenging, and take its toll. And there is something to be said for sleeping in one’s own bed after a long trip. There is comfort and familiarity to it. The end of vacation also brings the return of regular life, and for Nezhukumatathil, normal life is how her mother must “rush in the mornings to get my sister and me shuffled onto a school bus and herself off to work” (60). There is a sense of being hurried, and of interruptions to come that mirror the interruptions of “porch lights, trucks, buildings, and the harsh glow of street lamps” that “complicate matters and discourage fireflies from sending out their love-light signals.” The reader understands that getting ready for school, packing lunches, doing homework, plus getting ready for work, putting dinner on the table, and other rituals of everyday life prevent Nezhukumatathil’s mother from sending out her love-light signals. And though Nezhukumatathil is able to receive her mother’s love-light signals during vacations, it is suggested that, unlike fireflies, she is still able to recall those love-light signals after her mother’s death.
It is with her mother’s death that Nezhukumatathil closes the essay, but rather than summing up a funeral, she again employs fireflies as metaphor. As fireflies “blink on and off…as if to say I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here” (61), so do the memories of the tender moments with her mother. Nezhukumatathil longs to keep those moments in a glass jar, like fireflies, so that it can be a “cooling nightlight for those unimaginable nights in the distance when I know I’ll miss my mother the most” (61). Fireflies, for Nezhukumatathil, help explain life, and provide an vehicle for memory so she can get to the memories she most wants to keep.