I have known since single-digits that if you are bitten by a snake, you suck out the venom.
I don’t know if it was first in books (related: one of my favorite childhood books is Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, wherein this is mentioned) or told to me because I played in creeks and watery ditches, but I took that to heart.
They were the words to express what I had already experienced tangibly through buried slivers which made the skin around them red and angry. Through thorns and prickers which littered my bare arms and legs, sat middle and atop the little eruptions they made there. In the bee stingers which taught me how allergic I was.
When something gets in which doesn’t belong there, you get it out. You can’t heal until you get it out.
You could die if you don’t get it out.
I used to get so angry at bees, how dare they actively attempt to kill me, until I learned they aren’t attempting to kill anyone. They are attempting to protect.
That’s ultimately how I was able to convince myself I could fight back, and that Jesus would not be angry with me for doing so, even if I hurt someone in the process.
I learned all of this when I was still in single-digits.
And I never did fight back.
As though I could believe beings as humble as bees and I had anything in common. Instead, I admired that the bees had something available to them in moments when they required protection.
As a child, I thought surely I would be dead by 10.
Then 12.
Then 15. 18. 21.
I have been on borrowed time since 1986, and now I am an adult who protects the bees. Despite the allergies and the fact they have no understanding of what that even means.
At my Godfather’s 40th birthday, he had black balloons. All my aunts and uncles joked he was ‘over the hill’. I thought he surely would die soon, yet here we are in the big Two-Six, year of our saviour and lord Luigi Mangione, and I am due for black balloons.
My Godfather is still alive and well, yet I feel I won’t live past 40, and I am still protecting bees.
While I have never been very good at fighting back, I do agree I have to get out the poison. I may not have a stinger — but I can type.
And you have to get it all out, or you could die.
— FmL
Fauna Lewis Writes 