cicada one

You weren’t trying to be first. You simply followed the stirrings that brought you crawling out into the blinding air, up onto the bark where your skin crusted until it split and you wriggled free, feeble wings slowly strengthening as you clambered up toward the sun into the swaying limbs among the flashing leaves, to wait. Others were doing the same. You could sense them around you, thousands upon thousands, some ahead, some behind, all caught up in the sudden spike of massive, fated movement.

Finally your wait was over, your wings firm, your muscles anxious. It was time. You tensed – and then cast the full voice of your wings into the air.

You weren’t trying to be first, but as you released that chirring whir to be absorbed into the clamor of your generation, it cannot have sounded right to hear in return: nothing.

You persisted, the rub of your wings answered only by the slight circle of your own noises.

Dropped into that lone moment by accident and chance, it probably unnerved you to feel the emptiness, to sense that the resounding chorus of your kind did not exist – perhaps would not exist – possibly had never existed. For all you knew, the very stirrings within you were misguided.

How could you guess that, within hours, the remainder of your hundred thousand fellows would begin to rise, and sing, and fly, and mate, and die – a blurring frenzy for you to join, according to the rightness of your nature?

Out of that colossal throng of voices, one had to be first.

Had that fact occurred to you, it may not have offered you reassurance. Accident and chance rarely do – but they did grant you a gift.

Alone among your generation, you have known your own voice.

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copyright © 2004, michael w. hobson