In the summer we went to the synchronous firefly festival. There were a lot of rules about headlamps and blue light and where to sit. At first we were so excited, but after a couple of hours of sitting there you got bored. I thought it would be brighter or bigger, you said. I don’t know why, I just expected more. When we started to leave a man yelled at me to turn my headlamp off. I thought it was just another firefly road rage incident that we’d seen and laughed at throughout the night — people fighting over the best place to sit, or policing one another’s phone use. But I turned it off anyway, and that’s when I saw the glow worms. They produce the bluest light of any bioluminescent organism, a true blue. Later we realized we had misunderstood what synchronous referred to. We thought it meant that the entire mountainside would light up with fireflies at once. Actually, they still lit up at different times, it was their darkness that was synchronized.


✦˖°.

݁₊✦˙ .