The Firefly

I feel a stirring deep within
Slowly picking up momentum
Like the tide coming in to shore
Over and under in its course
I never want to lose what I have finally found
There’s a requiem, a new congregation
And it’s telling me go forward and walk under a brighter sky
Every nerve glowing like a firefly
— Delerium with Jacqui Hunt “Euphoria (Firefly)” from Karma (1997)

My grandparents’ farm lay in the foothills of the Canadian Shield, in Western Québec, where I spent my summers as a child. From the house atop a hill, fields stretched in every direction—hay, mostly—rolling outward, downward to the little stream at the bottom of the valley, then upward again toward the tree line. To a small child raised on a quiet suburban street, the scale was staggering. The world was immense.

In my earliest years the farm was still a working dairy. There were chicks in the spring, hens year-round, pigs, barn cats chasing mice, and Rex the dog circling everything. As haying season approached, my father, uncle and extended family would arrive and the whole place hummed in preparation. I was too small to be helpful but not too small to absorb it all.

On those June evenings my grandmother rocked in her chair on the veranda, curlers pinned to her hair, knitting steadily. My aunt sat nearby with her circle-a-word puzzles, a Rothmans cigarette burning between her fingers. My grandfather napped inside on the couch. The humid air would cool. The sky would widen. I drifted between them and the yard.

And then dusk would settle.

I would lean against the white picket fence and stare into the field, waiting. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, they would begin. Small lights blinking across the hay. Rising and dipping. Appearing, disappearing. Fireflies. Dozens of them. They were, to me, the most fascinating creatures I had ever seen.

One of my earliest memories is of a night when I asked my aunt if we could catch some. She found a mason jar and punched holes in the lid. She took my hand and we crossed the lawn, unlatched the gate, and walked into the field. There had been a lot of rain that year and the hay was taller than I was. I thrashed my arms in front of me to part the wet stalks as we made our way to the damp hollow where the lights gathered most thickly. I ran after them, cupping them carefully in my small hands. She opened and closed the lid for me.

One. Two. Three.

I hugged the jar to my chest as we climbed back up the hill. I held it up triumphantly to my grandmother on the veranda and she smiled. That night I lay in bed beside my aunt as rain came down and lightning split the sky and thunder rolled across my world. I watched the lights flash inside the jar until sleep took me.

In the morning, the fireflies lay still at the bottom of the glass.

I cried. I had wanted to possess them—to keep them close, to make them mine—and in doing so I had taken away the very condition that allowed them to glow. They needed the open air, the movement, the vastness of their field. They needed freedom. Without it, they shrivelled and died.

As I grew, my world became more complicated. I was not very socialized, so I was shy and introverted, and as a consequence I was bullied relentlessly through high school. I had no real friends I could count on. I stayed inside my own mind. I felt broken on the inside. Then the miracle happened. I found alcohol, and all of that anxiety and pain disappeared. For a while.

The substances multiplied. Addiction did not feel like a problem at first. It felt like relief. Like the end of loneliness. Like possibility opening up where before there had only been walls. But slowly my world narrowed. I stopped going to the farm. I stopped participating in family life. I got pulled deeper into the abyss, until it closed so completely around me I could no longer remember what open fields felt like. I had become trapped in a jar, barely able to breathe, sealed in a life I could not escape. The entirety of my adult life I have spent trying to escape that jar—the addiction, the mental illness, the trauma—surfacing at times, but always getting pulled back under.

But the truth is that I am free now. Free from the bondage of self that once kept me gasping for air. I have spread my wings, and in the delirium of it all I have found a new life, a freedom I never thought possible, that shines as brightly as the spark of hope in the darkest of nights.

I have become the firefly.