No. It wasn’t a metaphor for any of that. The moth answering the call of the light in its mistaken surrounding world (a network of perceptions with greater or lesser importance). The light so hoped for putting an end to its fragile body. A state of unbearable scarcity. It’s suspended fluttering, touching the heat, over and over again. If the moth survives, it returns for its death. Moths go to the light to die, disappearing in the luminosity. That’s what I see: something that doesn’t stop radiating. The moth gets confused, he tells me, it thinks any light is the moon, that the moon will make it fly in a straight line, that it will reach a safe place. How do you remember an image? The matte, reddish color returns before it becomes somewhat transparent. In one moment, the image shifted to abstraction, moved away from the insect, and no longer looked like the night air with the moths moving toward the lamp but the sea, the depth of the sea pierced by the sun and there below, in that infinite solitude, a countless number of organisms falling. They were falling even though they never reached anything, any surface (they very well could have been rising, but I saw them as falling and that certain sensation was possibly due to the way his fingertip felt as it softly slid across my forearm or because of the ovum in descent, about to land in my underwear). It was no longer his finger circling a part he wasn’t going to touch but the imminence of the end of the caress on my forearm that started to distress me. I had to leave. What is an image prepared to be: the air or the ocean or the intermittence? They’re moths inhabiting the world made up of what they desire and what they repel, which is the same light. And it wasn’t just the sea now that compelled me to remember everything the image evoked when the camera moved away from the insect, they could be red flames, sand kicked up by a foot, the sun peeling, dust suspended in our environments, in what we breathe when a ray of light pierces it, or restless birds bewildered by the dew, dots for tracing a line or completing a drawing, buzzing under the skin of my arm, or it could be the deep hole that attracts everything. At some point I said I need to go. And I gathered my strength, moved as I was by the tactfulness of that image, to return to my freezing bed and the landscape of my husband’s shirts, one next to the other, abandoned in my room. Every night, I had to open the door to that closet and look at those shirts from my bed; looking at them cloaked in total darkness was the only way to sleep somewhat peacefully.