Evelyn Alt

The moon visits me in the dead of night, asking me questions.

I fell asleep at my desk last night with my light dimmed low and a candle burning. 

It was then, as I lay sprawled across the wood like some old, overworked poet or crazed scientist, that the moon crashed through my ceiling and begged me to dream. 

“You do not have to know,” she whispered in the ruins of my bedroom. “But you must dare to find out.”

I shake my head in drowsy confusion; the dust of her fall has not yet settled. I am sure I’m dreaming; I’m not sure if I care. Her craters are deep, and I am engulfed in her overwhelming stone. She offers to tell me a story. 

Somewhere on the shores of Lake Michigan, where wild geese soar and tall grasses sway, a ladybug is carried in the wind. She tumbles over sandy hills and sun-warmed skin. She is happy here. This is familiar. This is home. 

The ladybug was born on the beach and had never ventured far from it—her travels extended from the edge of the grass to the crystalline, crashing waves. 

But she yearned. She longed. She pined. She craved a new view. 

At night, she dreamt of the dune where the lofty willow tree stood nestled among wild flowers. 

She dreamt of climbing the hill, of slipping through soft sand and flitting over sharp grasses, of sitting atop a flower petal, resting after finally making it to the top, embraced by the drooping, unbound arms of the willow.  

So, one day, the ladybug decided that it was finally the day to make the trek. She told her plan to anyone who would listen, and soon, a crowd of her closest friends and family gathered at the bottom of the dune to watch. 

The sky was alight with anticipation. The whole world seemed to whisper in an unspoken symphony of support. “This is it,” chanted the seagulls, floating through the clouds. “It’s all happening,” breathed the seaglass dotting the shoreline. 

‘I’m going now,’ the ladybug thought triumphantly. ‘I’m finally going to do it.’

Then, she looked out at the crowd. 

‘I’ll miss them all,’ she thought. ‘I’ll miss them when I’m far away above them and can only look down from a distance. I don’t want to go if it means leaving them behind.’ 

The ladybug was stuck. She was caught up in thoughts of nostalgia and failure, of homesickness and pain, of anticipating the embarrassment when she couldn’t make it. 

‘All these people know how much I want it,’ she thought. ‘How will they treat me when they watch me fail?’

The chance of not making it had become too real. It was too painful to know that if she tried and could not make it up the dune, she would know for sure that it would never happen.

‘No,’ she decided. ‘It’s better if I don’t go.’

So the ladybug sent away her friends and came up with more reasons she made the correct decision. 

‘It is safer here,’ she decided. ‘I love it here.’

‘Here, I can still dream of the willow.’

And then she lived. She spent the rest of her life on that same soft-sanded beach, surrounded by her loved ones, happily warmed by the familiar sun-drenched strip of land forever. She laughed with her friends and ate hearty meals, she spent lazy days staring out over the vast expanse of the lake, she questioned and she learned and she grew old, content in the life she had built in the years since putting that childish, overly-romantic dream out of her mind. 

Then, as she lay on her back, taking her last breaths, the moon stopped by for a visit and asked if she was happy. 

And the ladybug’s reply was simple.

“I wish I had gone to the willow.”