road update 3

Hi everybody.

I know it has been a while since I've written to you. The world on the road becomes very strange for me sometimes, and I don't always have it in me to write to you. It might help me if I did, it might help me sort thoughts and feel better, if I wrote to you regardless of how I felt and whether I had the spirit to do so. But you might not like what I would write. It would come from a very different place. It is hard to be more specific, but things are not always normal out here.

Here's a dragonfly.

I was in a grocery store, seated and drinking coffee, near the coffee stand. A necessary break I take sometimes and one of the few times I manage to see people. Well, there was a dragonfly trapped inside the store. I'd never seen anything like that before. And I'd never had occasion to feel sympathy for a dragonfly before, but here I was, feeling sadness for it. It desperately wanted to get back outside, and much like other trapped bugs, it repeatedly flew at the window. I took a picture because I'd never been that close to a stationary dragonfly before, but I wished there was something I could do to help it. I felt my attempts to intervene would only hurt the poor thing, being that I am a normal-sized human, which is much larger than a normal-sized dragonfly. Another customer was braver and smarter than I, though, and managed to rescue it. He got a sheet of paper and a cup from the coffee stand, placed the cup over the dragonfly on the window, and slid the paper between the window and the cup, temporarily trapping the dragonfly. He released it outside and everybody seemed to feel okay about the world for a moment, having seen a person do something nice for a helpless creature. I wondered if the dragonfly was eaten by a bird after flying away from the store.