The Transition Artist

I had forgotten about the fireflies. The tiny little firecrackers that lit up my grandparents’ backyard and once flooded my memories of childhood summers, with their little sacs of glowing goo that sometimes streaked the jar I caught them in to win a slushy from the 7/11 gas station. I forgot that they fly here, too. In fact, it had been so long since I had seen one that when I first saw the flash of that tiny light, I stopped dead in my tracks and stood utterly mesmerized, frozen mid-run, just to wait for the little spark I had seen to come back.

It’s not that those little bugs don’t exist in other places; I remember one catching my eye as it breezed by me one evening this summer in the south of France. But I had forgotten about the flood of memories that always fill my mind when I see a little tail light up. I had forgotten how lovely it is to see those little flashes, and watch as my childhood danced around my memories.

There are a few certain things that I will always associate with growing up. Coming to Nashville, and finding that fireflies light up summer evenings here, too, is one of them. My first year here, as an excited college freshman, marked the first independent stage of my life. I learned about myself in interactions with new friends and a large population of students, and alternated between spending a massive amount of time in my portable hammock, lounging until the fireflies came out, and going to loud house shows (the music school version of house parties). I allowed myself to seep deeply into my “granola” phase, a time when I stopped wearing make up, dressed like a cross between a strange hippie and a Native American, and intentionally left my phone at home and went out on little adventures in the woods by myself.

Every now and again, I feel a quick flash of nostalgia as I think about that time in my life, remembering, in a flash as quick as that of a firefly, my favorite moment. I am brought back to the feeling that rose in the pit of my stomach as my hair whipped around my face and my body felt light, glued tight to the bed of the pick-up truck I lay in as I watched the stars fly above me on the way to the lake. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the bubbling fearlessness of freedom that rose in my stomach, and remember shrieking a little as I erupted into a fit of laughter with the friends that lay on either side of me as we picked up speed. I remember screaming something about being alive that my friends couldn’t hear above the wind. Then, the memory fades again.

I laugh a little and shake my head when I look back on that time, remembering myself as though I’m remembering an old friend. I think about how much wonder must have filled the eyes of that younger version of myself when she looked at the stars and the fireflies. As I think of myself now, I see an older version of that person, but only feel the wonder that still lives in me when I catch myself tilting my head to the side as I lose myself in thought. 

Instead of the little hippie leaving her phone at home and going to house shows on the weekends, I am the college senior getting carded for a glass of wine at the art crawl, who is asked almost every day what she’ll be doing in four months when she graduates. As I pull up pages upon pages of job opportunities in cities spanning the globe, in search of my “next big step,” I find myself yearning to find that young college freshman again who didn’t have a care in the world. I long for that feeling of lightness I had as the wind whirled around me on that summer night, so easy to obtain when the “real world” still felt as though it were some distant place I might travel to in the future.

But then I see a little flash. And as I wait for a tiny bug to light up again, wondering where it might appear, I realize I’ve been waiting for a long time. As I sigh and close my eyes, the little glow that lives inside of me, the sum of all of the wonderful moments that have brought me to where I am now and all that they have made me, lights up instead.