When I was younger, I desperately wanted to be an entomologist. I found insects fascinating, possessing an innate quality I interpreted parallel to coolness. I felt being able to study and view each insect under a microscope to be most satisfying. However, it should be said that I never had such close encounters with insects besides, being the small, visual learner I was, through encyclopedias and unproportional diagrams.
Now, I am 19, and I despise insects of all sorts. A hatred stemming from over-registered tactile sensibility, and an overly-vivid imagination. Insects felt like a sickness, unspoken but not unseen—something soft and rotting beneath the civility of kindred and societal warmth. When I think of the joints: glistening, lacquered like black enamel left too long in the sun, bent not with grace but with inevitability, a logic ancient and unreadable. The legs—too many, too precise—curved and bristled, hair-thin feelers sensing some silent command. There was a kind of intelligence in them, mechanical, divorced from warmth—the very warmth that I, as a child, was too generous with.
My hopes and dreams for the future…they are quieter now. Less scientific, less exact. Mere thoughts structured in a manner more hypothetical than procedural. I no longer wish to catalogue or classify, but to feel—and to understand why we recoil, why we open. I know I’m meant to create, though not produce. Perhaps I wish to make stories, or spaces, or systems that hold others gently, unlike the spindly, twitching limbs of my former fascinations. I want to remain near warmth, but this time wisely. To practice devotion not to the obscure, but to the precise intimacies of daily life—conversations that don’t curdle, silences that don’t punish, homes that don’t hide rot beneath the floorboards. My goals feel less like reaching, more like returning, though to what, I can’t quite say.
To soften, to shape, to stay near the living.