[You Are A Firefly]
When I was a child and visiting with my father in North Islip, Long Island, my older sisters and I created a lifetime of memories –– especially during the summer months. We’d run through the neighbor’s sprinklers and sprint down to the neighborhood church for free lunch. My sisters tried as hard as they could to teach me to ride a bike that was twice my size and, in the evenings, we would sit outside and chase lightening bugs.
That’s when life was simple.
Thirty years later, as I am having conversations about relationships and trying to make sense of it all, for myself and for others, I think back to those days and those brightly gleaming, winged bugs.
And this is what I realized:
We’ve all had those relationships that baffle us when they’re over. You wonder why this person fought so hard to be with you and, then, just left. You look at who you have become since you met them and you realize you’re barely recognizable, a shadow of your former self.
They took so much and left you lifeless.
But why?
Well, see, it’s like when we were kids hanging out in the neighbor’s front yard during those warm, still summer nights. We’d sit and watch the sun go down and we’d wait.
We’d wait for the fireflies.
The lightening bugs.
And every night, around the same time, they’d seem to spring out of nowhere and light up the sky and light up our lives. We’d dance around them, our arms outstretched, our palms grasping at the air until, finally, we’d each caught one.
We wanted them because of their light.
We wanted to possess them, to take them home, and that’s what we did. We trapped the bugs and their brilliant light in Mason jars with the tiniest little holes poked in their lids.
The light was ours.
And, later that night, we’d place our bugs next to our beds and stare at the jars as these fireflies fluttered…
…and, then, faded.
We watched them as they died.
But, we were never sad because we knew that the very next night, we’d stand in the yard, watch the sun drop from the sky, and welcome the brilliant buzzing of thousands more.
We did this every night.
This is like that sort of relationship in which someone is attracted to you because of your light and they want you to be all theirs so, they entrap you, they suffocate you, they keep you from the world and the skies you were meant to soar. They change you and they just sit there and watch you die just before they discard you and capture another.
And they do this over and over again.
When you look back at them, they have moved on and you’re still sitting there, destroyed.
Sweetie, you’re a firefly.
Fly high above their reach, always leave them grasping at the air but never capturing. Glow and twinkle in the darkest night and leave them below you, in awe of your beauty and the power you possess on the inside.
For true love will never want to pluck you down from the heavens and away from your source. One who truly admires you can do so from afar, for real love and admiration does not require capture and does not result in the extinguishing of light. Never change, never come down for anyone else and, please, be who you were meant to be.
Fire.
Fly.
