cicadas scream of eternal heat

today i had to go out for grocery shopping, a task relatively easy to handle, alleviated even further by the fact that until xan comes back to canada in october, i've only the responsibility to shop exclusively for one single person ; me, myself and i. despite the canicular heat waves absolutely destroying my asshole back and forth, my skinny frame who dresses solely in black would venture off a street and a half away from home to the nearest store. perhaps it's something you've gleaned already if you've seen the power lines pictures i post every now and then but despite purposefully going out of my way to live the life of a lonely hermit, i actually quite enjoy walking. perhaps now a little less since xan's not there to lend an ear to my mindless ramblings of occultic shadows or whatever's occupying my brain at the moment but still i walk everywhere. montreal's graced with a pretty solid public transport system and i'll use it if i need to get across the island, of course. but whenever the tasks at hand only require a short distance i tend to prefer gallivanting with my long gazelle legs and my uneven frame. today, i took a small detour to said park because for my brain "just going to the grocery store then coming back home" just isn't satisfactory. unlocking my door and relocking it, the efficient walk, a calculated four minutes, the time to pick and choose whatever meal i'll make for this week (typically burritos), the four minutes back home, unlocking then relocking my door, unpacking, it feels too mechanical, too empty of meaning, and so i walk. granted, the 39 degrees celsius that the sun decided to blast upon me and my pasty vampiric body cut that walk short but it was relatively enjoyable nonetheless. throughout the entire time i was out today, i kept thinking about the noise surrounding me. granted that's kind of a common sentiment when i go out, i'm fairly sensitive to noise outside. maybe not overly so but enough that i try to cover it with my own thoughts in order to distract me from the social anxiety of a thousand eyes seemingly staring at my every move, from the way i walk to the way i breathe. today's noise fortunately was graced with the presence of cicadas, probably my second favourite insect (the first would be the solitary japanese rhinoceros beetle standing guard with its mighty horn) and sign of true, hot, drenching summer.

back when i was a kid, i used to ask a lot of questions. to the amusement or perhaps eventual annoyance of my mother, i was and still am eternally curious, partially dissatisfied with the commonly easy answers shot out at me. "why ?" i'd ask. an answer would in-turn come out, typically something more than satisfactory, only to be immediately followed back by another "but why ?". that incessant curiosity would often get, to my own confusion, misinterpreted by adults for an inability to accept answers, even the world, as they simply are. it works like this, like that, move on, sort of deal. it was implied that i would simply have deal with nature's simplicity before growing up. but truly i believe that my pursuit of knowledge, of understanding above all else was always at the forefront of my, albeit, very small child brain and now even more so pushing its way out of my moderately sized, defo normal, please don't joke about it, kind of brain. as a child, the noise cicada made weren't a sign of the summer's heat gracing another day with the sun's smile kissing its horizon, it embodied death throes. cicadas have a pretty generous lifespan across both living underground and in trees, singing its days away as it seeks to mate. and while generally they tend to live a few weeks after that act, they also very much die following it. this small trivia, this unassuming factoid of everyday life straight up terrorized me as a child. to sing your own death feels like something out of a fiction book, and granted i was an imaginative child, an imaginative adult still to this day but the very idea that someone, something could feel its own death coming and choose to celebrate it in its last moments felt perturbing. so for today's screams, a noisy cacophony of summers past, present and future to calm me in my distress, i guess it felt like something worth writing about, right ?