Don’t Stand So Close To Me…

I like to keep my things in jars. I have many jars all around my room. I used to as a child go out in the woods behind my house and collected bugs. I had so many in my collection. Water bugs, butterflies, lightning bugs, and all sorts of beetles. I used to watch them crawl or fly around their jars. Each one or type I guess had their own jar to call their own. Little worlds that they could live in. Live in until they died. They always died. Why did they always die on me? Everything always dies on me. Mother, sister, and the bugs. I used to label them and everything.  It would drive my mother crazy. All the jars filled with dead bugs under my bed. I couldn’t stop collecting them though. No matter how many died or how upset my mother got.

Growing older I became more and more fascinated with the bugs I kept in my jars. Though I never had the passion to really understand what it was that I was collecting. I wasn’t book smart my mother used to say. I just liked the way they looked in their jars. One day while exploring in the woods I heard this odd noise cut through the singing birds. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard in the woods before. It sounded as though a small child was crying. Was my sister lost in the woods? Over and over I heard the noise. The closer I got the louder the noise became. I knew I was on the right path. Frantically I searched for the noise until I came across a small deer. Not quite a baby but not yet an adult. It was just there lying in the open grass between some trees. It saw me before I saw it, but it kept crying. Figured it would run away when I got close enough and between me and you it tried, but the little deer had broken its leg. As I got closer it struggled to get away. Dragging the broken leg behind it. Leaving a trail of blood. I had never seen so much blood before. It looked so odd, so out of place amongst the green of the grass. I got so close to the deer that I could reach out and touch it. The cry it was making was so loud by then. The sound was almost unbearable. I studied the hurt animal as it tried to get away. I watched it for so long that after a while I couldn’t even hear the sound it was making. I couldn’t hear anything.  

It must have grown tired because after some time the deer stopped trying to get away. It laid its head down in the grass, its mouth moving, and its chest moving up and down rapidly. Cried and cried as I watched. In that moment in time, it was only me and it in the whole world. The deer’s rapid breathes become slow and shallow breathes. We locked eyes for what felt like a life time. I placed my right hand on the back of its head and it went silent. Silent like it knew what was going to happen next. I tried to make it quick. Grabbing the top of its muzzle with my left hand I gave it everything my little body had in a twist. Its neck snapped. I know I heard it or maybe I only felt it, but it wasn’t enough. Its body flopped around in the grass as I tried to hang onto its head. I tried twisting its head again, but it just kept shaking my hands lose. I could barely keep a hold of the deer. So, I jumped onto its back like anyone would I suppose and tried to wrestle it still. It was all happening so fast until everything seemed to stop around me. I was so frustrated, so angry that I lost control of everything. I seemed to have gone to another place within myself. By the time I came back to reality there I was holding this deer’s head in my hands. I no longer cared about bugs. Not when there were so many things out in the woods that needed my help and attention. I find that people are much the same as that deer or the birds or the rabbits of the world. They all need my help and attention.