Actias Luna
“Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.” - James Dean
Gossamer wings settle on a pale dogwood branch. Creamy blossoms, blush dusting their silken petals, scarcely quiver in recognition of the company. Chartreuse veils of flight shimmer in the dawn light and two eye spots stare balefully at the rising sun. The creature is young, only just having emerged from its catatonic state of alteration and yet, it is already far into its diminutive lifespan.
Mottled emerald foliage encompasses the newborn like a mother swaddling her child in blankets. The buffet, tempting to a lesser creature, holds no sway over the child of the moon. She requires no sustenance. Her primary reason for existence is not to extend her own life, but bring life to something new. Cashmere antenna flicker under the oppressive humid breeze. She bears the inexplicable desire to wait. For what, she doesn’t know, but her instincts are all she has to follow.
Time pulls on her delicate form. Her sheer, lime-hued wings wither and fissure. Feathered sensory receptors become brittle and curl in upon themselves. She decides that she is waiting for a partner. He will set her tumultuous feelings to rest and let her restless soul be soothed. Her decrepit wings shift and absent scales flutter into the inky darkness beneath her branch. Despairingly, she hopes he comes soon.
Movement flickers along the peripheries of her cataract blurred vision. Like her, the visitor has been ravaged by Father Time. His antenna, once full and downy, lay tattered and stringy against his faded green back. She lets out a heave, reminiscent of a human sigh. He has finally found her.
Her Savior didn’t last through the remainder of the night. Just beyond the crumpled shell of his once life filled corporeal form, the dawn’s light kissed a bundle of pearlescent orbs. Pulsating beneath the satin, milky skin shell curled the fetal continuation of the Luna’s existence. Time will pass, and the younglings will hatch and grow into the same instinctual mission of their predecessors. Lacking any maternal mannerisms, the moon moth turned her back on her progeny.
Bereft of any desire but to experience life for only herself, the Victim of Time spirals skyward from the haven of the orchard’s lone occupant. Dancing across the sirocco, dust trailing her abused silken form like a yellow-green comet, the barely-a-mother child revels in her moment of finite freedom. Swathed in sickly pale moonlight, she tumbles through the blanket of stars with gangly finesse. Something akin to happiness clots otherwise simpleton thought processes. She is free. She lives for herself.
She plummets.
Across a dingy, vine-ridden concrete walkway a mother lays crumpled and fragmented. Moss scales no longer shimmer in under the terracotta streetlight and creamy white – blind – eyes portray the grotesque stare of a long since dead corpse. She who played serf to inexplicable instincts and unsought desires, yet rebelled against her character traded a lifetime of servitude for a glimpse of free will. The life bringer to a precious brood whom she will never convene with in life or death does not stir when the wind shrieks her name. The striking Sky Dancer that tamed the wild Chinook lays eternally dormant.
All manners of beasts pass the scene. Some lope like panicky gazelles caught within a lion’s fearsome gaze while others meander like sheep grazing in a serene meadow. They all carry different life paths and they all carry different intents. Few are prisoners to complete freedom and many remain loyal servants to order and conformity. Children, parents, lovers and haters all trod upon the dirty, creeping vines.
But no one notices.
