WHY THE MOTHS CAME by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

                                                                          And do you know, even now, 

in the thick of it, as they 

blend into this place like 

the gloaming 

becomes night, 

as they land on my skin 

like whitethorn  

on the soil;

 even now, still, 

I could not tell you 

why they came. 

 I had been making ready to leave, as I always seem to be, as I always thought was the way that everyone experienced place. 

It was Winter.

The land was being visited each day by a light that was metallic, shifting. There seemed to be a silence to my evenings I had never before encountered, and I wondered if it was this newly born, curious hush – in a city that in reality, had started once more to violently, deafeningly riot –  that was making me dream of snow.  

I was getting everything in order, as best I could, in the only way I had ever known how. I was undoing all the threads that tied me to that oak-bounded, ghost-bordered city: boxing up books to offer a bookselling friend, donating dried goods, giving away most of what I owned, loosening the ties – in any way that felt fitting – to people, and experiences, objects and memories, held within its haunting, ancient walls. Cutting, breaking, clearing: I was shedding. I was making ready to leave the city in which I was born, one in which unfathomable trauma had winged its way into my life, like the night birds of some echoey and unending keen.  I counted them up one night, watching the fire’s embers die a slow death, those places I had left behind. It was the week before the winter solstice – the part of the year where the circle and the line meet – and a helicopter in the northern sky was making shadows on the terraced street. In a fortnight’s time I would be turning thirty-six; averaging a house per year, for each and every one on this turning, burning earth. It would be the first birthday I’d spent without having either my closest female friend or family member in my life; both women had left in the latter half of that calendar year, although only one of them had died. Each had played their own part in the trauma that still swelled on the hollow parts of my inner geography, each having hoven – lower and lower –  any sense of safety I had in places I inhabited; into the unseen depths, with almost every one of their actions and words, over decades. Yes, much change was germinating that winter when it came to the issue of place but not all of it could, by any means, be termed visible.

In hindsight, you know, I suppose you could really say that it all started a bit earlier in the year, in fact, than I had fully realised. I have only just recalled, now that you are asking me, that it was St John’s Eve on which the first one found me, a handful of days after the Summer Solstice; exactly half a year before I really started to notice them. Two full seasons before they began – dusty winged, delicately beautiful –  to redraft the maps I had carried from place to place, over land and water; places I first revisited –  then abandoned – nightly, that nocturnal unpicking of the silvery golden threads; tying us to our meandering ghosts.  I was camping by the banks of the Bredagh river, across the border, alone with my books and my grief. I tended, for the week I spent there, a fire into which I placed the bones I gathered on my daily walks along the shore; in accordance with the old lore of my homeland. I do not know how much of such lore you may know, or may once have known, but have long since given away. On that day, the eve of St John’s, I had been caught completely off guard when first it came. It came to me in colour, on that silent summer’s night, as many things do when they carry within their folds the sinew needed to lift us up; as though we were weightless, winged creatures in some great and sudden storm.

RED & BLACK:

danger & attention

blood & burning

loss & longing

warning & mourning

history &horror

MORE

&

more 

and 

more, 

besides.

She was right there, on the path in front of my feet, as close as you are to me now, just as I was returning from swimming in the place where the river finds its way back to the sea. She was the first one that came. She will always be the first, of course, and it’s always this bit that’s a wee bit hard; please excuse me if I don’t quite get it right.  

The body of water that day had been silken, near on silent, and I was the only person to draw near to it at all, let alone to enter. Returning to the campsite I stopped to buy strawberries from a man at the side of the road, and cheese from the small farm-shop that had been closed when I arrived but the lady ushered me in from behind the single shutter with her bare, thrush-speckled arms – allowing me time to choose the cheddar from the fridge –  even though it was, in fact, the only cheese that she could really offer me. I arrived back, carrying the makings of dinner, in hands already too laden with objects before their purchase – and I watched the cobbles in the yard turn red as the dropped fruit bled out onto stones warmed over decades by that same sun under which I stood. 

This was the moment they chose, of all the moments that span a lifetime, to arrive, from wherever it was they had been before they came.

I could not name the first one, and its markings were so melancholy-seeped, so affecting, that I almost wept. There was no signal to be had there, on that north-westerly, storm-sculpted tip, and so it was many days before I could name that dead creature, stripes of red and black; the first one that came to me in that year.

The first one that came was a Cinnabar Moth. 

 The first moth, when it came, was dead.

I thought no more of it, in any way of which I was conscious, anyhow, until this moment as I am telling this to you.  It is only now that it sits a bit odd with me, nearing a full year after that June happening, that when the same one came back – alive, and many, many miles across an unmanned border, I never once gave it a second thought. No, I can’t really think why, either. Look, of course I know it wasn’t the same one – sure the first one had been dead for who knows how long – but I long have counted myself as someone keen of eye and ear when it comes to such poetic coincidence. 

It was probably only a week later, I’d say, because I remember I was hanging out the washing from that trip when the next one came. I’d been listening to the goldfinches charming the air with their bell-song, when I realised I’d left the laundry basket at the bottom of my rented yard – back up along the concrete, poppies; poking out from the gaps in between, places where no seed had been sown – and there it was, resting on my oldest, bluest work jacket, as though it were the subject of some Instagram post, an oil painting on the front of the literary journal that (coincidentally) bears its name; as though we were not really there in the middle of that broken-up city at all, neither me nor this unearthly, mirrored moth. A real one, a live one, to take the place of the first one; the one with which it all began. I lifted the empty basket and returned inside, dinner needing made, dishes needing dirtied so that they would, in turn, be needing washed. 

It was summer, and it remained so for some time, and then it was autumn – but to be fair time has done the funniest of things since they came along. Not the stuff of speeding up and slowing down, neither the stuff of stopping – the only way I can put this is to say that time has become erratic, hard to catch – to hold – identify. You think it’s there and that you are moving along with it, and that it is passing, unfurling, opening, marching, trickling, flowing, and everything; all of those things – all of those verbs that time can normally do – but then you realise it isn’t. It just, and simply, is not. It is not moving, it is not carrying  you anywhere. It is flighty. It is sometimes iridescent, at others it is see-through. Time has become light like and winged; shall we say ‘lighty’? (I wish I knew the right words) but I will keep trying; I want to make it as clear for you as my limited understanding can seek to make it. 

What I mean to say is that it is like a shard of the moon falling onto a broken ash-tree, that only you can see. It is like when you are grieving – so full of mournful self-pity you forget to breathe – and a rock is lit up by an unseen source and then you lift it – you lift the rock, and a newt gawks up at you, and it begins to rain; it begins to rain on you –  and suddenly there is no longer salt leaving its sorrow trails on your skin. 

Time shifted when they came but also it didn’t at all, not even nearly. It changed colour and shape but these things aren’t really the thing, you see. Really it was only ever these two things in the first place: flighty, lighty; a place, you might imagine, that goes and that comes, and sometimes we enter, and sometimes we stand and watch it from afar . And sometimes that ebb and flow grows legs and antennae – wings and feelers – shell and pinchers, and sometimes we draw near but most of all we cannot reach it, we cannot touch it; it is gone. All I need to try to get down here with you is the fact that time showed itself that winter; dancing far outside my grasp, as well as being right there –  in the mud beneath my feet, in the dirty bathroom, at traffic lights, on buses, in food, on and between book pages, in dreams, sent from ex-lovers, wrapped in the cloths of the dead, on social media, (on every media), in manuscripts, in my hair, on both my arms (but only my left hand, only on my right thigh); time revealed itself that winter and it was fragile and darting, folkloric and murky; it was winter, have I told you that the winter had arrived? 

Time was – for the whole of that winter, and throughout all of its aftermath – a flickering thing, a glinting thing, (a lost and then found and then repeat again thing), a sheening thing, a fiercely and questionably ethereal thing. 

I suppose all I needed to say was that time, that winter, was an insect.

I feel ill equipped to comment on anything outside my own experience of that particular winter. As well as the deficit of words, there are also far too many, so many that we might drown. I thought perhaps that I should make a list but then I worried. I worried so much that I could no longer sleep or eat because I knew, you see, that such a list might never end. Still, you understand, I have yet to learn to name them all, it is an endless, thankless task. They do not wait, you see, they will not pause; there are no gaps in this new place where they might let me catch my breath. 

I arrived here as night fell, just as the last week of December began. It goes without saying that I arrived to find them already there, on that flitting, winter’s night, in a house I barely even knew. They had come, it seemed, in an uncountable, unbidden number. They waited at the front door, long fallen out of use – boarded up for over a decade against the outside world – and all that it contained. The markings on their wings were varied, memorable, exquisite. It will not, I suppose, surprise you when I tell you that they followed me inside. That they made themselves at home in this stone railway cottage, sought out corners and cobwebs, nooks and crannies; they made room for themselves in parts of that small dwelling I had not before known were there. It is an uncomfortable detail, you will understand, but I failed to ask the moths to leave, that night, and I have kept my silence on their presence until this day.

Now I will be truthful here, embarrassing though it may be; I dipped my foot with the people who already thought me odd. Stopping for breath, on late winter afternoons, as the orangey grey sky flooded over with that incessant tide of evening, I steered the small-talk with the farmer towards their coming. Towards their being here, in this place, in such inexplicable, unruly droves. They were so beautiful, too overwhelmingly so for me to know how I might give them voice, but I needed to try to find a way – any way –  to try to begin. No, he would always say, not for a very long time – not for years, not since the curlew days, the hand-worked days – the moths had left this place when he was but a wean. Lookit, he remembered them alright –  just as well as all the others that had left – but he tried to let them go, those memories of the moth-days; from seasons that were gone before my birth. In the supermarket at the nearest town, the same cashier asking if it’s cash or card, and I comment on the necklace round her neck – a butterfly, and note how I have seen few – so few, but what about those moths, right? Everywhere, and all the time; how is she managing to sleep at all, to bring herself to work on time, to continue like they aren’t even there?  

I began, slowly, as I know you know, to write of them. 

I drew their forms with pencil marks at dawn. 

It happened in the way that things are sometimes wont to in the winter – cautiously, fearfully, silently – with restless, shivery hands. I suppose it’s how you found me, images and words dotted here and there like the dust off the very wings I tried to speak of. People came forward with their explanations – friends, a solitary and distant family member, professionals, trappers, artists, writers, smiths of many forms – a stalker, and a person who had ghosted me for half my life. The claims were many, too many to recall, but anyway; I could find no link between that cacophony of voices, and those creatures I had shared my winter with; no silken thread between the shouting and the silence.

Gradually, quietly, I began to listen to those moths that had come along; without reason, without rhyme. I took their pictures when they asked, my phone bearing witness to them through early morning videos; ones thought dead trace the lines of my palm on the screen; like nothing I have any real comparison for – spotted ones, speckled ones, ghostly ones, wooded ones, small ones, large ones, furry ones, mottled ones; I need it to be known that they came. 

That it was winter. 

I need for you to know that somehow, in the depths of winter, they came.

At the beginning I begged with them to leave: look at this place, I wailed, at their velvety, insect bodies. Look at all this work there is yet to do. Pleading would not cut it, though, they took to sleeping on my body then at night; sweet, ancient breath on skin – the beat of them – in my hair, in my dreams, in my bones. I put out every light, blocked up all the hollow places; still, even then, I would find them sleeping in the nests of every bird. Amidst stinging nettles, in the drain pipe, on the thyme, across the flight-path of the hunting wren – on the radio, in my dreams, in those that others’ had of me – I could not find a place in which to hide. They came through windows, down the chimney, across boundaries, over barriers; the moths came, the moths came; the moths came. The moths came and that is really all there is to tell. I took them out, gave them back to the crow-black night – but they waited for me, still, at the door. 

That long-drawn winter is gone, of course. I awoke as Spring danced in through the window to find them still by my weary side; winter left its moths behind in its wake. They came and there was nothing I could do, no action I could take, no words that I could mutter, that would keep the moths from coming if I tried. 

Slowly, with the passing nights, I found their names in any places that I could. Listening and looking, drawing near and waiting; I wrote their names in all the places we were still permitted to go. 

I listed them, I named them, I hallowed them; I finally let them settle beneath my skin.  

We’ll give them a wee minute, just, to let them waken up.

I’d ask only that you call each one by name. 

The list is at your feet.

The light is by your side.

They are coming, 

they are coming;

                                                       it is winter.