Fireflies

My sister has adopted her peer's habit of attempting to use youtube as her own personal music library. She's a legitimate thirteen year-old teenager now, complete with a smart phone grafted to her hand, horrendous spelling, and the belief that capitalizing every other letter makes her cooler. We've settled upon some music we can both enjoy, and now the computer screen is filled with a man at his keyboard and a series of whirring mechanical toys.

	Owl City - Fireflies
	Found at skreemr.com

I smile. Before I left I had trouble enough grasping that she was eight, my clearest memories of her are when she was closer to five or six, before I got sick.

You would not believe your eyes
If 10 million fireflies
Lit up the world as I fell asleep

Cuz they'd fill the open air
And leave teardrops everywhere
You'd think me rude
But I would just stand and stare

I can remember running through fields at that age where long grass licked my ankles and tugged at my bare feet, chasing fireflies. My grandmother brought me a jar from the kitchen and we tapped holes in the tin lid with the point of a Phillips screwdriver. I remember the sheer joy of seeing them hovering in the twilight over the quad at college for the first time, that fantastic feeling of coming home to something familiar.

"You remember fireflies," I ask her, "from our old house?"

She doesn't hear me, she's absorbed in her texting. I go back to stirring the rice pudding on the stove.

***

Even at 9 I had known something very big, and probably very bad was happening when my mother had taken me to my favourite restaurant for "special time together." I could normally count the times we ate out on one hand in a year.

"Pika," my mother said gently, "I have some very big news."

I dug into some ice cream with a spoon. If mom was going to spring bad news on me I was going to at least get a chance to eat desert first out of it.

"Our family is going to be a little bit bigger soon."

"You're pregnant?"

"We might adopt a little girl from China who hasn't got a family."

I remember being overwhelmed by two thoughts. The first was that at the point where my mother was telling me this there wasn't really any actual "might" involved here at all. The second was that my mother was in her mid-fourties and dad was scraping fifty. I couldn't think of anybody that age with a newborn child, and couldn't figure out why that was.

"We're going to be about 10 years apart?"

"Yes."

"Are you...expecting me to help raise her?"

"Only as a sister."

I took another scoop of ice cream, thoroughly unconvinced.

***

By mid-high school my sister was calling me "Mom" by mistake more often than I was comfortable with. I remember doing the same thing in early elementary school with my Waldorf teacher, first calling her mom once by accident and then repeating the "mistake" because a part of my head really liked that idea.

***

My memories of being sick are blurry, but I distinctly remember finding and watching Grave of the Fireflies. More friends than I could count had told me I would bawl like a child at the end, but instead I couldn't remember being more enraged at a film. The boy had an obligation to his sister before his personal pride, and no matter how wretched his aunt was being I felt he should have stayed there until the food stopped, in order to try to provide for his sister. At 10 years apart he needed to care for her and put her above all else, as she'd never be able to look after herself at that age. Just looking at that little tin of candies in the grocery store made me mad for months.

***

Leave my door open just a crack
(Please take me away from here)
Because I feel like such an insomniac
(Please take me away from here)

***

I went to college more resentful of my parents than you'd believe, and every time I thought about them I worried for my sister. Issac and I were too close in age for me to protect, and my mother had always gotten along very well with him, but my sister I could do something about. All I had to do was graduate well-decorated, land a steady reputable high-paying job in a very good school district and get a chance to take care of her during her high school years. This desire stemmed from very simple logic: either my parents were not as bad as I thought they were, or I would be a terrible person to leave my sister to the same fate when I had the capacity to do something about it.

***

But I'll know where several are
If my dreams get real bizarre
'Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar

***

"Why don't they light up?" a six-year-old me asked, shaking the newly-re-purposed peanut butter jar.

The jar was hastily steadied by my grandma, "Don't shake it, you'll hurt them. I guess they just don't feel like lighting up right now."

My cousin Tom taught me how to kill the bugs when they lit up and smear their color on the pavement, but this was not what I wanted. I wanted a living, breathing nightlight which I could care for and in return could light my room.

Leaves, sticks, more air vents, I even once opened the jar after mom tucked me in to let them roam my whole room, but the results were always exactly the same. The next morning I had nothing but dead fireflies.

"Well, maybe they are just fragile," Mom offered.

Almost fifteen years later I am standing in the Torii lobby asking out of the blue if anybody ever mastered this.

"I just don't think they survive the night," Jen offered, "they are probably short-lived..."

I sighed, "I just probably never knew how to care for them."

***

There are curling irons mixed in with the rockband controllers. She's fooling with the wires and a little upset.

"There was a man outside when I was walking the dog," she informs me. "He was smoking and drinking."

I smiled a little bit. My sister was still untangling the cords.

"He asked if he could pet the dog and I was scared, so I said no because she bites and came back."

Thirteen. What does a good parent of a thirteen year old do? Certainly no drinking, no hardcore partying, limited going out late, having to stay out of trouble, and forget doing any serious dating... I'd essentially skip the lifestyle of my early 20's for four years, followed by another four years of being careful and financially stable to provide her a good college education. I'd need to move into an apartment with space for her and shift my work hours so I could be with her. Would the company feed her like they feed me? Otherwise I also need to make meals for her...

Even if I could do all that, could I provide her a good home? Would it be any more realistic or do her any more good than the stick and some leaves in a jar with air holes did for the fireflies? Single working parents have to be nearly heroic to raise children well...and here I've barely figured out all the stuff I have to not do, let alone be sure to do.

"Shit," she says, tugging on the cords.

"You're getting a little gratuitous with the swearing." I add, "It doesn't mean a lot if it's every fourth word."

She looks up at me with an expression I cannot quite fully read, but it definitely says "but you swear."

I'm not sure I can do this.

Grown Up Grown Ups

Nothing has so thoroughly impressed upon me how severely pathetic humankind is as the experience of working in a cube farm.

I worked in IT. This meant that I was in a unique position. On the one hand I was removed from the food chain of status symbols, and on the other I was frequently the personal bitch of whoever called the help line.

I worked in basically a three cube by four cube space that had become the IT office. This was my first "real" job where I was paid by somebody else, wasn't a camp counselor, and wasn't selling things door to door. Calling me naive was an understatement.

There was a woman who was lurking near my peripheral vision as I worked my first day. After five minutes or so I felt nervous, and after about ten I started thinking I must be doing something wrong.

"Um, can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Rob."

"Well he's not here right now, but I'm the new intern, can I help?"

"Well, I was wondering if you could move me up the list."

"The list?"

"Of who gets a new monitor. I really need one, it would help increase my productivity."

If there even was such a list I was pretty skeptical that begging moved you anywhere you wanted to go on it, but mostly I was skeptical why a woman so invested in her workplace productivity was lurking for prolonged periods outside my office.

As spring break progressed I became increasingly aware of the hierarchy of the approximately 400 person office. The best thing was to have a big office, followed by a small office, followed by a window cube, followed by a large cube, followed by a phone with caller ID, followed by an LCD monitor, followed by a big CRT. There were subrankings of various sizes of monitors. All higher rankings automatically got the stuff the lower rankings had. Accounting seemed to be the people everybody else looked down on to feel better. It was probably the only place I knew where people in 2007 would fight over the size of their CRTs.

***

"So, what can I do?"

"We need to replace some phones." My boss pointed gave me a box of nice new phones with all the gadgets you would never really need to use and a list of persons to deliver them to. All of them were delivered to large offices where important old men sat. Oddly enough these old phones seemed rather nice, and an odd thing to be replacing when I had seen far rattier phones while walking around accounting. It was not long before I had filled the box with the replaced phones, which I brought back to my boss.

"What should I do with these?"

My boss presented me with another list. "Give these people those phones." This list consisted of people in smaller offices with the odd window cube thrown in. Their rejected phones went to the double cubes, which went to the single cubes, all the way down the poor man in accounting who grinned at his new ratty 1980's attrosity like a five year old at christmas.

This was my life: monitors, cube moves, new phones, all had to be brought down the food chain item by item to preserve the hiarchy of power. My primary purpose was to push the little cart around delivering the goodies nobody in their right mind should actually care about from place to place.

***

I dimly remember the pre-hippy days. I remember that my daycare was called "Mother's Day Out," and that I use to beg to spend as much time there as possible. I remember that there was a small slide in the corner, and under the slide was a box-like structure with round holes in each side. This was my fort, and from this place I would sometimes quietly curl up and watch the goings on in the play area with my toy squirrel.

"What are you doing?" some girl called. I remember that she wore a white flowered shirt, and that she was a lot bigger than me.

"This is my space, and I like it."

"Oh yeah?" The girl stomped up the slide adjacent to the box and sat atop my hideaway, swinging her feet across my vision, "Well this is my spot, and its better."

***

"And," the old man asked as I ran cords and adjusted the computer system, "is this a good phone?"

"Same one I have in my office, I think its pretty nice."

"Hrm..."

The man leaned back in his chair, "Well, I suppose IT knows how to get the good things don't they?" I chuckled politely. He watched me for a moment before leaning forward to ask, "Is this better than my old phone?"

I had no idea what the factual answer was but I knew what I was suppose to say, "Oh yes, its one of the nicest phones in the building."

***

"Uggggggggggh," Playlist rolled his eyes.

"What?"

"So my brother bought some new shades using my ebay account. They were Oakley brand, but when we got them we found out they were in fact 'Oakey' brand and he didn't really like them...so he went to resell them. The new buyer also got upset that they're 'Oakey' brand but it turns out they really are Oakleys its just they write the official logo funny..."

***

We're obsessed with stupid status symbols we have invented to make ourselves feel superior to others. I guess I'm not shocked by that, but I am impressed that we don't even know what the symbols are suppose to be anymore.

***

"Shit!"

Michael grins at Mandela and leans over and says the word as loud as he dares, which isn't very loud in fourth grade.

"You can't SAY that."

"Yes I can."

"Teacher's going to hear you!"

"Not unless you rat, are you a rat?"

Mandela crossed her arms and hugged them to herself, "Bet you don't even know what it means!"

Michael scowls at her. Its evident she's right and that he's lost face for it.

***

"Alright so if we leverage rapid prototyping with our available resources for sensor fusion..."

"Which sensors?"

"What?"

"I...can we try that again in plain English? I'm not understanding what you intend to do."

"So...if we..." the voice trails off and I'm faced with an eerily familiar scowl.

***

"Mmmm mmmm," the lady next to me at the lunch table in the cafeteria says, "that woman is a BITCH."

"Oh you can't talk like that," says the other stranger, "Do you know who she is?"

"Girl, I don't CARE who she is, and I don't care who her friends are. I got higher friends than her. I ain't afraid of her."

***

Everybody always seemed big to me, but Laura was big to everybody. She towered over Mime and me. I was too foolish to be afraid of her, but Mime was quite busy with alternately being terrified and adoring this girl.

"She has an older brother," I remember Mime telling me, "He's very old, like 12. He shows her the movie Batman and has lots of teenager friends."

I remember not being adiquately impressed by these attributes in Mime's mind, much to her dismay. "Look, she's the coolest kid, you'd better be nice."

Now the three of us were standing talking, Laura leering over us as usual, "You don't have an older brother," she said to me, "who makes you cool?"

***

I'm texting back and forth with my sister. She just got in another fight with mom.

"Yeah sometimes that happens. Try to stay cool."
"I cant i ask her one thing and then she starts telling me CRAP about wat i said along time ago and it pisses me off :("
"Don't blame you. Still just stay cool or you'll give her some ammo to throw back at you later."
"Ok i will try its just that she talks about herself ALOT."
"Yeah. You will kinda notice very few grown ups ever actually grew up."
"Hahahaha you got that right :)"