Forever Less of Beauty
August 07, 2024 at 12:08AMAs Elissa Altman wrestles with her night brain, she remembers moments of joy and beauty and the fact that we cannot have light without darkness, cannot have ease without hardship.
On a clear night in 2020, two months after our pandemic lockdown began and halfway into my estranged mother’s four-month stay at our home, I stepped outside onto my front porch and noticed an emerald-green male luna moth sitting motionless near the bottom of the cherry door frame. I left my wife and my mother inside drinking spigot wine with Peggy Lee on the turntable singing “Fever”; I sat down on the top step and leaned in close to it. The moth didn’t flutter, or fly away; for a moment, I worried that he had died in the way that Isabella tiger moths do in the chill of early autumn, when the temperature drops precipitously and they become immobile, their wings fluttering slower and slower, and then, not at all. But it was warm that May night and the luna moth was very much alive; we sat together in stillness for what felt like hours. I could hear my mother and Peggy singing through the window screen behind me: Sun lights up the daytime / Moon lights up the night. I was watching him; he seemed to be watching me. I wondered if he could hear the music, and I wondered what he made of it.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/06/forever-less-of-beauty/
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