Wings Above Water
BY: MARYEANA ROLA
Images by Winta Assefa
I remember childhood summers I would spend on the beach, making sand castles using the tiny buckets another kid had left behind, or simply swimming in the shallow parts closer to the edge where water and land met. I was always so scared of going in the deeper ends of the water, because I hated touching the slimy grime of seaweed with the balls of my feet. I was a brave kid, but nothing beat my absolute fear of seaweed in the water.
One summer, when I was ten, I decided to do something completely different. This time, I wasn’t going to build sand castles, go for a swim, or even dip my toes in the water. However, I wasn’t just going to sit in the shade and do nothing but listen to seagulls squawking every second, either. Instead, I wanted to try my hand at photography, so I took my mom’s phone to take a few photos for practice and probably delete them right after.
It was around noon, and the sun was at its highest, so it illuminated almost everything – the sky, the water, the sand, the trees. It was the perfect time to take the perfect photo. I was walking along the shore and saw a bunch of small seashells in all different shapes and colours, but the one that I saw most commonly among those seashells were the ones shaped like what reminded me of swirls of ice cream. So I took a picture of one of the white, spiral-shaped seashells that had light brown splotches around it, before tossing it back into the sand.
At the time, I thought I was just playing around with photography. Looking back, maybe it was something about seeing the world through a camera that made me pay more attention to the smaller things I usually ignored.
There were a lot of people out playing ball or lying down sunbathing in the sand, or splashing each other with water, so getting lost in the crowd was one of my bigger concerns. I was walking along the edge of the shore, starting my way back to my family’s canopy. The water was now a beautiful shade of dodger blue and moved rhythmically in waves. I looked down at my feet, which engraved footprints into the damp sludge of sand. I stared off further into the water, and noticed a small insect floating. At first, I thought it was dead like the dozens of others I saw.
Then, I took a closer look.
Five years before, during my kindergarten years, my mom would drop me off at a family friend’s place everyday after school, since she had work in the evenings and couldn’t leave me without a guardian. Other times, my guardian would drive me there. The house was pretty far away from where I lived at the time, but my mom really trusted this friend with me. I honestly didn’t mind, since the woman had two daughters of her own that were my age, one of them being my kindergarten classmate.
It was one spring afternoon, and after an hour nap and a few episodes of Little Einsteins, the two girls and I decided to go outside and play in the backyard. There was a lot of uncut grass, deceased flowers, twigs of all different sizes scattered on the ground, but most importantly there was a table and chair resting around the back end of the yard. I took a seat after a while of walking and grabbed a sip of water from my bottle, before noticing a small club of honey bees hiding under the table. At first, I didn’t know what they were doing there, and the possibility that the table could’ve been their resting place or their new hive had simply not yet existed in my child mind.
When I was a kid, I loved to have everything I wanted. A new trendy pair of shoes? I wanted it. A friend got a new set of kinetic sand that I didn’t have? I wanted that too.
So when I saw those bees under the table, I wanted to be alone. The table was my territory this time. I decided that they and I just simply couldn’t co-exist, so I did something completely stupid.
I whacked them with my water bottle. They weren’t too happy about that.
I didn’t know too much about insects, but I did know that honey bees were known to be the more gentle ones when they weren’t being threatened. When I did that, I definitely regretted it almost instantly. My first instinct was to run away and head back into the house, but I was in these bright pink flip flops and couldn’t run quickly enough to escape them.
I was hit with this sharp, abrupt pain on my left knee and calf, and on my right shoulder. It was like being stabbed in the skin by tiny, burning hot needles. It was the worst feeling.
My friends saw what happened and quickly rushed into the house to get their mother. The bee stings were swollen red, but they were carefully treated using some Polysporin that was always carried around just in case one of us did something silly.
In the end, I somehow got what I wanted. I promised myself I wasn’t ever going to interact, or even be in the same vicinity as a honey bee again.
The tiny bee was on its back, floating along the surface of the water. I watched its panicked struggle, its tiny legs desperately flailing, clinging on to its life. With its wings sunken in the water, its only fate now was inevitable death. Some part of me felt satisfied. After all, this was like a way of exacting revenge on what caused me trauma over the past years.
But then I realized I was too petty, and it was suffering way more than I did. For me, it was merely bee stings that I endured. It wasn’t life-threatening. I woke up the next day feeling fantastic. However, the poor thing was close to being fully submerged in the water. It didn’t have another day if I didn’t do anything about it.
My mind was a tangled mess when it came to choosing between two options. I had a reason to save the insect, and I had a reason not to. I didn’t know what to do.
A quick second flashed by as thoughts passed through my head. Finally, with a sigh, I made my choice.
I cupped the bee with my two hands, using the gaps between my fingers to clear away the water, and softly blew air to dry it. It had been trembling in panic, but soon it fully relaxed itself on my hand in relief, almost as if the thing found it unbelievable that it was still alive.
After some time, the afternoon heat did its work, and the bee was fully dry. Surprisingly, it didn’t sting me like I had anticipated. After all, I reached out for it first, hands open. I was an easy target.
Maybe this time it didn’t see me as a threat, or maybe it was just too exhausted to fight back. Whatever the reason was, when it finally flew off my palm, I didn’t just feel a sense of triumph—I felt lucky to have been trusted, even for just a second, by something I grew up being afraid of.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hi, I am Maryeana Rola, a Filipino-born grade 12 student who moved to Toronto at the age of 4. I am a casual writer who likes to write and reflect on my childhood memories, and I currently journal my ongoing life experiences. I’m also an avid music listener and enjoy songwriting and other forms of arts & crafts.
