Dear Wigleaf,

Hope you and yours are well.

I write from New York where every angle has been cleared, plotted, and placed by human hands. I think about how, even on gauzy nights walking to Walgreens or to the local market that doesn't put price stickers on their goods, I can't hear insects gossiping. I think of summers in Kansas in my grandparents' grass, astonished by the evening around me filled with lightning bugs pretending to be stars. I think about how I would catch one and bring it in cupped hands to my father or mother or whoever would participate in my wonder. I think about how sometimes I opened my hands to find the liquid light smeared on my palm. I think about how the road along my childhood house curved to meet railroad tracks and how those tracks had fire ant hills boiling along them, how I gambled on the length of stick to stir them up just because I was young and flirting with menace.

Sometimes I wonder, and almost fear, whether on the way to heaven we meet all the things we have harmed — the bees bothered into stinging, the fire ants pulled biting from my ankle like an electric staple, the lightning bugs with broken bulbs, my own small, six-legged heart.

Forgive me, everything. For everything.

Very truly yours,

Roblin