My Cousin Committed Suicide

The first day I was here, I was immediately startled by what appeared to be a large mosquito. With spindly legs sprawling out the distance of your average coffee mug, they certainly looked menacing. Afraid that it may give me malaria, I killed it with a piece of my room insurance paperwork.

As I learned in my writing class later on, these are not in fact mosquitoes, but simply a harmless, though ubiquitous, relative. I still don’t know the name of them in English, but here they are referred to as un cousin.

In France, there is a proverb that refers to these cousins, one that celebrates their apparent powers of divination. It reads:

Araignée du matin,
Chagrin
Araignée du soir
Espoir

This roughly translates to “you see this bug in the morning, you’ll be depressed. If you see it at night, you’ll have hope.”

Neither the most insightful, nor the most vivid of poems, but you do you have to congratulate it for its succinctness.

With this knowledge in mind, this morning, when I was taking a shower, the bathroom was full of the cousins. Of course, I paid this no heed, as they are generally omnipresent morning, noon, and night, and somehow I have still managed to be rather content.

But, as I was nodding off in the hot water, one cousin in particular caught my eye. He had been flying above my head for some time, nonchalantly. Now, I know he must have been working up his courage.

Taking a nose dive from the corner of the shower, he flew directly and purposefully into the drain in the center of the floor, disappearing down into the pipes and beyond immediately.

This makes me wonder, if the mere presence of un cousin is going to make my day shitty, what will witnessing the insect’s suicide result in?

While I find that question perfectly valid, you have to wonder if that attitude is why he took his own life.

Maybe he just wanted to stop the mania of predicting humans’ moods. To take control of his own life, his own day.

Maybe he really wanted to be eulogized in some random person’s low profile blog. To be a martyr of his race. So that humans will no longer look at him as solely an annoyance, a war game, a prophet, a loser in the Darwinian game show of life, but as a fellow creature of this world, with his own problems, his own love, losses, mind, body, soul. So that we can learn to treat the cousins that live on with the respect of fellow autonomous beings.

But then again, he could have just been a really fucking stupid mosquito.