Poor moth, I think, while staring at my screen
As if the foolishness belongs only to it.
I pity the moth for mistaking the lamp for the moon. The moth circles the light with such devotion, such helplessness, and when I witness this, it becomes an image I can understand before I have even thought about it. Poor thing, I think. It does not know the difference between what calls it and what kills it. It does not know that the moon is far away and brightness is the only truth it knows.
But I do not know if I have earned the right to pity it.
Here I am, confusing a screen for the world.
Or I tell myself I know the difference.
I know the room around me still exists when I am looking down. I know my body is somewhere, my neck bent, my eyes drying a little, my hand moving almost without any instruction. I know there are things outside the screen that cannot be refreshed or scrolled through or kept open in another tab. The world has weather. It has smells, laughter, sorrow, conversations that go on too long, cups of tea going cold, and the strange presence of another person breathing near you. A screen can show me these things, but it cannot be them.
Still, knowing the difference has not saved me from confusing them.
Perhaps I would like to think the moth also knows something, in its own moth way. Perhaps it does not think the lamp is the moon. Perhaps that is a story we invented because it makes the moth seem foolish and us seem separate from it. Perhaps the moth is not making a mistake so much as obeying the only language available to it. Light means direction. Light means something to move toward. Light means continue.
I wonder how much of my life has been arranged around things that glow.
There is literal glow, of course. The phone lighting up in the dark. The laptop becoming the first and last face of the day. That glow contains messages, books, maps, money, memory, music, photographs, proofs of having existed somewhere. I am not saying the screen is evil. It is useful, and has carried voices to me when I needed them. It has held poems I would not otherwise have found. It has let me write things before I knew whether they deserved to be written.
The screen asks so little of me physically. I can come and go, look without being seen, speak without my voice shaking. More importantly, it makes the world available while keeping the world at a distance. And because distance can feel like safety, I begin to call it preference.
Usefulness, a very clever disguise.
I begin to say I like it this way. I begin to forget that some parts of me only appear when I am not in control of the frame. The moth does not have this luxury, and its wants are visible. It throws its whole body at the light.
It is easier to pity the moth than to admit we understand it. It is easier to say, poor thing, it cannot tell the difference between the moon and a flame. We say this while moving toward our own little brightnesses, again and again, even after they have burned us. Not all burning looks like destruction, and I would like to think it more often looks like distraction. Some of it looks like losing the ability to sit in a room without reaching for something. Some of it looks like becoming more and more informed, and the consequence being less and less present.
For the moth, flying toward the flame and flying toward the moon both end badly. The lamp kills the moth because it is too near and hot. The moon would kill it because it is impossibly far and cold. One destroys by contact, saying come closer, and the other by distance, saying keep going. Either way, the moth spends its brief life in relation to light.
But what else is a moth supposed to do?
This is the part I cannot move past. We speak as though survival were the highest wisdom. For a creature with such a brief life, a moth living voluptuously is still dying, and the one avoiding every flame is still dying, and the one refusing the moon is still dying.
The tragedy is not choosing wrongly.
And then I have to turn the thought back toward myself, though I don’t really want to.
What am I preserving myself for when I refuse the world and choose the screen instead? There are days when the screen feels like a lamp and days when it feels like the moon. Sometimes it is too close, too hot, too full of other people’s voices. Sometimes it is distant, showing me the illusion of somewhere else, someone else, a life beyond my reach. Like the moth, I throw myself at it. I tell myself I am looking for knowledge, connection, rest, fulfilment. Sometimes I am. Sometimes I am only moving toward it because movement toward light feels better than sitting in the dark, because busyness can imitate being alive.
I do not intend to say that the screen is the villain, and the world outside it is not automatically more real just because it has trees and dust and traffic. A bad conversation in person is not truer than a good sentence read online. Sometimes a message can save a day. A digital photograph can hold someone or something with unbearable tenderness. I want to look at this in black and white, but the distinction is not between false and real, and the question is not whether the light is natural or artificial.
Then what am I trying to ask?
I think it is whether I can still tell what is happening to me when I move toward a certain kind of light.
The moth cannot pause in midair and ask itself whether this brightness is making its life larger or smaller. Perhaps it can. I am not sure. But I can, at least sometimes. I can notice the small thinning of attention. I can notice when I have been looking at the lives of others instead of living any portion of my own. I can notice when I am not seeking the world through it, which is what I tell myself, but hiding from the world by being inside this.
Noticing does not always change anything. I wish it did. I wish awareness were stronger than habit. The flame is not the moon, but it is still light. The screen is not the world, but the world we live in flows through it. I want to say I will choose the room, the weather, the person, the body. I do want these things. But even as I write this, the words are appearing on a screen. Even this attempt to think against the glow depends on the glow.
So I surely do not know how to end this. Only this image of the moth, still circling. Only my own face lit faintly. Such a strange humility, realizing that awareness has not made me less vulnerable to brightness. It has only given me more elaborate ways to explain why I keep flying toward it.
Perhaps that is close enough to being the moth.
Yours in thought,
Yana