cicada season

on growing and changing and singing bugs

by Khalil Gibran

I repeat the words to myself—a mantra—‘I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change.’ Tomorrow I will begin to daily journal again, I will wake up early, I’ll finally go to the gym and other people will not bother me. I will, I will, I will do it all tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

Tonight though, I watch a bug fall from my roof and die on my bed. One of those small unidentifiable insects: triangular body and tucked in wings. If I were writing a book this would feel moral and my high-school English teacher would call it a metaphor, but this is real life, I think, and things just die. The cicadas chirp softly through my open window, only just peeking through the birdsong as there are not yet enough of them to symphony as they do in the midsummer. It’s the first spring warmth and I have it in me that I will try to fix things again; I’ll clean my room, stop leaving dishes in the sink, finally mop the bathroom floor. Maybe I’ll be nicer, or text a friend back. But as the breeze flows in I am struck again by bittersweetness. I am sticky with sweat and laying uncovered on my bed. I know only that the world is big, and I am small, and that it is warm far too early in the year. But I have this persisting feeling that the spring, all riddled with growth, necessitates a human rebirth too. Perhaps something akin to a new year’s resolution scribbled on scraps and forgotten in the junk drawer. That seems to be how it always goes for me. So, all I can think to do is drink another beer and roll into sleep.

When I was much younger, and primary school would stretch until only days before Christmas, I’d engage in a ferocious competition with my classmates. We’d run buck-wild down the hills behind the oval where we weren’t allowed. Our crumbling leather shoes loudly crunch the tanbark and drying grass. Gleeful squeals would escape, and I can still feel the ache in the side of my stomach from running right after eating. Our hands would return to our meeting place scabbed and red-raw from tracing gum-tree trunks up and down, trying to find the hidden treasure. They’d come back softly clutched, holding the prickly shells of the cicada molt for the counting. It was ritualistic. It was the turn of the season, of our age, of our year. Sometimes if you pulled them from the bark just right you could stick their exoskeleton to your skin, or your shirt, and it would stay there too. Some would make a crown of their wide brimmed hats and stick them there like jewels, others would revel in the harsh crunch of their shells underfoot. But I can’t quite remember what I would choose, I don’t think I ever could: I’ve never been good at making decisions. But I know there were times I’d let them stick to my skin and just hope they’d fall out of sight before I was expected to crush them. I know I wanted to be granted that mercy.

The Australian cicada lives underground as a nymph for seven years, then emerges to metamorphose and shed their shell. They become what we never really know them as: new and colourful. Almost a florescent green with dazzling wings—yet we only see their brown, prickly death. They see the world for weeks, and then they are gone and withered, fleetingly. Perhaps more poetically than I could think to put it; Amanda De George writes for National Geographic: ‘If the cicada does not free itself in time, the shell hardens around it and it is trapped, frozen, half changed.’ Despite ecdysis being wired into their DNA, being a necessity, it may still fail. Change is not easy, even for those it should be. It entraps us, consumes us. We may come out the other side better and green, or with shrivelled up wings. But the cicada still lives: if wings lay dormant, then they will walk the earth instead of flying. They will call and cry and mate because the world keeps moving and they are born to do one thing so nothing will stop them trying.

I suppose though, their ‘death’ we see isn’t exactly that. It’s a change, an old life left behind. I wish that it were possible for me to crush that shell of mine underfoot—to really see the old me dead and gone. To know that each ugly part of my soul is shattered in pieces beyond any human ability to piece together. But I also know that I cannot simply pull the black threads out of my body: they are tangled wires and I must take the time to unravel them, rather than tearing them through skin. But the cicada is never truly gone either, remnants still linger. Fourteen years ago, I may have crushed a molt and that nymph’s grandchild may be the one calling to me tonight. And their child may reach me in seven years and I will be laying in a different bed. And I will have grown again.

Seven years ago, I was twelve; beckoning thirteen closer from my bathroom floor. I had succumbed to media’s Americanisms and believed in teenage-hood as the holy grail of growing up. Wanting and willing my first teen birthday to arrive finally, I was convinced that something within me would finally change, that some higher power would transform me into someone unrecognisable. I saw age as a marker to hold onto firmly in a world that was so quickly unravelling. Time was that (un)concrete thing I was chasing. Now, seven years on, I await twenty. The core of me is no different from what it was last time; and I sheepishly think of the exit from my teen years as something huge too. I want to run from it and hide in my six-year-old self on that porch, when the world was too huge to understand and I could simply catch bugs and fall asleep at noon. But I beckon my birthday closer too for the same reasons I did at thirteen: to be so rid of every ugly thing in my past in a concrete way. But I know that’s not how it works. I am now the daughter of the cicada that laid her eggs seven years ago. I have been in the dirt, sleeping and waiting to change into something I cannot comprehend. To shed my skin of bad habits and beckon in this new era in the hope that it will be so much better than the last. But I am of the same DNA as my mother—of me at thirteen— and the core will not be any different, but that’s not so bad.

The cicada may emerge unrecognisable from its metamorphosis, but that newness, the bright green future was always there and dormant inside its tiny body. It could only have come from seven years of waiting underground. And that old dark nymph is dormant now, having done the hard work to grow something strong and changed for its new self that can finally fly away from the dirt. The old lays down to sleep again now, resting in two pieces: a tiny sliver inside the insect’s past, and scrunched in a child’s hand. But the old self never sleeps underground again. It dies warmed in the sun, and the only certain thing it did was change. The old and the new, her and I, are intertwined forever, because no matter how separate, how different we may feel, we are of the same body and experience, and one cannot exist without the other.

Possibly, we just don’t notice the growing until it’s done, we cannot—as the cicada does—simply hold the shells of our old selves tangibly. The human mind struggles to understand things so conceptual as time and growing, even if we know they’re happening. But we love to make a mark, so particles of us are still left behind. I leave bad poems I thought were good when I wrote them at seventeen. An eroded hearing aid battery I remember dropping a month ago slips out from behind my desk. My housemate shows me videos of us in February and I feel like I am looking at a stranger with my face, but I can’t even fathom if it’s my face either. Those are the shells of me I wanted to crush when I began writing this. But I said I was bad at making decisions, and I know the pieces are not so terrible as I thought. I know for certain that I did not stagnate, that change does not have to be huge. I have no shrinking exoskeleton to escape from, no hardening body to race. Time does not speed or slow and my weeks of living really stretch years. As the spring fades into summer, I will sweat out every ugly thing in front of the people I love as I do each year. And in seven years I could be so different, or I could be the same, but the cicada I hear sing tonight will have two hundred sons and daughters, and they will sing to me again no matter how much I’ve grown.

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I wrote this piece in the mid-spring last year, around October I think. Hence my references to age (I’m actually twenty now). I’ve been wrestling with posting it for the past few months, but I think it’s finally time. And I think I’ve grown since then too. Thank you for reading and supporting me! I’m aiming to be more consistent with posting here, but topics worthy of a full essay seem hard to come by.

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Sources:

Cicada - superfamily Cicadoidea (no date) The Australian Museum. Available at: https://australian.museum/learn/animals/insects/cicadas-superfamily-cicadoidea/

Cooley, J. (2017) Emergence failure, Cicadas. Available at: https://cicadas.uconn.edu/emergence-failure/#:~:text=Molting%20can%20fail%20at%20any,low%20vegetation%20in%20any%20emergence.

Cyclochila Australasiae (2022) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclochila_australasiae

George, A.D. (2019) In pictures: A cicada sheds its skin, Australian Geographic. Available at: https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2019/02/in-pictures-a-cicada-sheds-its-skin/