Cricket

A long time ago, I was sitting on a rock on the shore of a lake when I noticed the dried brown body of a cricket clinging to the side of the rock. This is called the exoskeleton. A cricket slips out of it's shell as it grows and emerges as a rubbery new creature. It slips out of itself and becomes itself and leaves itself behind. The shell left behind is like a sample, a display model. It is a perfect cricket, yet no longer a cricket at all. The shell is perfectly preserved, as if the cricket had taken great care when it climbed out of itself. It is like a ship in a bottle, and also the builder of the ship in the bottle. The old cricket is fragile, papery, yet rigid, tenacious, clinging to itself and to the point from whence it departed. People who  have died, if they were beloved, leave this sort of shell as well, not on a rock or on a blade of grass, but on the minds of those who loved them. Here, those who have died, though absent, are prefect, tenacious, urgent, eternal. One flick of my finger would have removed the reminder the cricket had left behind. A gust of wind would do the same. But I  lifted not a finger. I looked out over the swaying grasses in the shallows and to the ripples beyond and to the green where the water was deep and caught the sun on the furrows made by the wind, and I lifted not a finger either to the tear that made its way down my cheek.