Does Hating Brood X Make Us Xenophobes?
Reflective/reflexive note on the italicized statements: These are literary visualizations based on feelings I expressed or heard neighbors or friends say or that I read online and in social media.
When will they die?
Find someone who engages your paralyzing fears as much as your rational ones and they are a friend for a mirrored life. They were, though — dying. Fewer rambling, intentioned bodies flew around Princeton, New Jersey, their breeding center of the state. My toddler and I live there, in a meadow, his never giving them a second or an unnerved thought. Our woods welcomed Brood X into the concert hall and bedroom of their dreams.
I do not want them near me.
Of their imaginable dreams, I do not know them, not really, not their insides nor their minds. I know the graphs of their life cycle from articles I read. I judged them from the outside — what I saw, but really how I felt, how seeing them made me feel.
I block their sound with my headphones.
Some musicians went into the woods and played music, saluting their gentle, perseverant nature. They stood with open arms, beckoning them to mistake the human body for a tree trunk. Selfies poured into national news outlets — these were predominantly children, gleeful, calm, sometimes covered in them. Community, acceptance, harmony.
“They are dying,” I told my friend, feeling immense relief but also queasy because I was rooting for death. I thought about Pharaoh’s hatred of the Jews. My toddler was onto something when he commented that the cicadas reminded him of the locusts we study at Passover. The cicadas swarmed the air and trees in our complex, but, I admit, there were pockets of air. In BC Egypt, Plague eight of ten, if you breathed, you breathed in a locust. God’s vicious messaging meant to cause Pharaoh to say, This is too hard, unlivable, please stop, yes, I will let the Jews go.
The image that fills my mind comes from one of my earliest Haggadahs. There was a man crouching at the bottom right nook of the page, a look of desperation and terror, the rest scrawled in green, black, and red, swirls of locusts choking out air. This is hatred, in the form of Pharaoh, that enslaved the Jews to make cities for Egyptians for 400 years. This is hatred that believes you are the best of everybody. This is hatred that says yes to all kinds of cruelty for their people because being a slave master is too good to pass up. How many examples are there of this hatred in history and present day?
One ran into me, so I screamed.
About the queasiness they caused me — maybe cause is not the right word. A cause can be re-worked, maybe, but there was no possibility to upcycle my experience of them. My reaction was fixed, impermeable to sense.
I wished, waited, and wanted for them to die.
They are everywhere.
Males screeched their bodies and females clacked in response (if anyone studies queerness in cicadas, send over your tymbal song). Five of them crawled into my son’s Jack-o-lantern basket to mate (that scene became particularly macabre). They smashed into my windshield like apocalyptic furors as I fled what used to be my home and was now also their home.
I was impressed in my heart chambers at their resolute showing up, yet fantasizing about my space being mine again, eventually looking at what my sense of space, and safety, meant — the ability to walk without coming into contact with anything to make me uneasy or harm me?
Is that crazy…or is that every creature’s birthright?
In the early part of their cycle, I visualized an ecstatic notion: my running outside, singing in interdependent joy with their thickest air at noon while they created everywhere.
I said, what problem?
My ease erased and unnervingly immediately put in place a frigidizing, boiling fear after one smacked into my face and, in a slow-mo horror movie way, as my peace got broken, I realized they were all around me.
One got into his house, and he fell apart trying to get it out.
The emotion — this is emotion, calling it a belief becomes something else — of being anti-them is ridiculous. At the least, taking a scientific approach (they are uninterested in harming the human body), feeling fear is unsubstantiated. Yet, that fear ruled my life for those next three weeks. When my toddler was with his other parent, I only went out at night, their quietest time. Against all advice in the what-not-to-do article — do not change your routine, do not assign them an obsessive center in your brain — I made my discomfort my world.
I will go outside protected head-to-toe.
After their dying, clumps of burnt brown autumn form on the trees. The females lay their eggs there to protect their babies from predators, taking in the nutrients they need for that life process. Tell me there isn’t something beautiful about green leaves in the swelter heat of summer punctuated by crunchy bunches. When my toddler and I again circle our complex midday, him on the scooter, me speed walking, he passes me a dried branch, curious and joyful.
He calls it a stick for energy.
