There was a bee in my apartment. I heard it buzzing earlier, and I opened the door so it can exit. I thought it was a fly anyway, but I didn’t want to kill it. I don’t think it left the space. I got my confirmation later, when it was evening and I was working on my laptop. The bee suddenly flew towards me, and the light, with a buzzing so loud and sudden it scared me, and I screamed. It was a big bee.
Jumped away from my seat, I saw her on my ceiling lamp, the Octopus lamp, as the former owner of the apartment had named it. She was resting on one of the tentacles. I tried to scare her away with a towel, but she wouldn’t budge, except later in the evening when she simply changed tentacles. Of course I was watching her, I didn’t want to be caught off guard another time. Until I called it a night.
The morning after, I saw her. She was lying on the floor, right underneath that tentacle of the Octopus lamp. I imagined her dying up there where I left her and slowly falling onto the ground. Or maybe the fall was fast? I don’t know, I wasn’t there. She was on foreign ground. She wasn’t supposed to be there. I put her on a piece of paper towel and let her rest there for a second. Her body was much lighter and almost empty. I know, it’s “just a bee.” But death is death.
Two days later, I finally decided to bring her out, and leave her in the community garden as her final resting place. The garden was locked, but I spotted a joyful sharp-edged tulip, and I magically managed to put her inside of it through the iron fence. Curled up inside, she was back where she was supposed to be all along. In the sweet nectar of the juicy flower. “Now she can rest there forever,” my husband said to indulge me. “But it is too late,” came out of me, and I started crying, crying, crying. Crying as I walked the streets under the Spring sun, crying as I am home typing this. Was it for the bee, or was it for all the stories that contained this finale? For chances and lives wasted? For the incompletion, for potential unused, for the unfairness of early and abrupt story endings? Ah, but what do I know. Maybe the bee was supposed to meet me. Maybe that was her story. So little in size, yet she could have drowned in the tears I’m crying for her.
