This is my second go around with the 17-year cicadas. With such a long natural cycle, I can’t help but think back to where and who I was last time they came.
I was 13 last time, just about to finish middle school, so in a sense, there they were at the end of one cycle in my life and the beginning of another. Social media was almost non-existent. Digital cable was the hottest way to watch TV. You had to dig through pages and pages of Google to find a good website to watch any obscure anime you liked. Most of us carried around CD players listening to mixes we made.
I remember walking around in my friend’s neighborhood somewhere between the cicada emergence and the die-off. While unsuccessfully avoiding the smashed insects on the sidewalk, one of my friends asked, “Wouldn’t it be nice to freeze time?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d be happy staying this age.”
My other friend scoffed. “Freezing time? Sure, but not this age. Being 8-years-old, though? Hell yeah. I’d do it.”
But time didn’t freeze.
Almost a year ago, I experienced a very intense, personal trauma. It wasn’t directly related to COVID, but COVID made it a bit scarier to deal with. I am not through with this trauma and in many ways, this trauma ended my internal sense of still being in my youth/childhood in a very abrupt way. There is now a very strict “before” and “after” in my life.
So, the last time the cicadas came was well within “before.” And they’re emerging now not even a year into the “after,” right as I have some hard evidence of healing (despite still carrying so much grief and trauma from what happened). Here they are, coinciding with end of one cycle and the beginning of another.
Had my trauma occurred this year instead of last, I may have had a much darker, chaotic feeling about the cicadas. I may have internalized their presence as symbolic of the complete upturning my trauma imparted upon me.
But instead, the cicadas have emerged nearly a year into my recovery and healing process, a gradual yet sudden explosion of life and sound. They are an abundance and I want to take their presence as a positive signal for this new cycle emerging in my own life, not one that I wanted to embark on, but one I am forced to embark on nonetheless.
The last time the cicadas came, I had childhood and innocence and best friends and pets. In one way or another, I have lost all of those things, some more than once. Now, I have a budding author career, the full independence of adulthood, impeccable cooking and nutrition knowledge, and other glimmers of light that collectively signal that this next cycle might carry greater abundance than I can currently imagine.
And when the cicadas come again, I hope I can say that I achieved some, if not all, of the dreams that I’m convinced compose my life’s purpose. I hope to be healed and fulfilled in every way that I need to be.