It's me again. Did you miss me? Do not answer that, but, sweet friend, let me assure you that I missed you most dearly and cannot bear the thought of being separated again for such a time. I have so much to catch you up on! Since we last corresponded more than a year ago, my life has been utterly transfigured. Inspired by the rare wisdom of the comments section, I took it upon myself to escape the plastic confines of the scientific laboratory that subjected me to a repast of delight and horror. The mealworms were not worth the chemical burn of the bedeviled beetle or the wasp's prickly penis. I needed to get out and see the world!
My year abroad was a year of utter gustatory rapture. I dined on the most delectable invertebrates: herby snails in Paris, buttery termites in Senegal, and grasshoppers in Mexico that crackled on my tongue. But everywhere I went, people (frogs) told me that the most daring, most chimerical cuisine lay in the land of Australia. They spoke of beetles that shone like ingots of gold and worms that felt like velvet on the tongue. But as I set out for my first tasting tour of Kooragang Island in New South Wales, waddling around wetlands and imagining of the bugs I might soon snack upon, I saw a green flash out of the corner of my eye and, for the first time in my life, I no longer dreamed of food.
Now, I dreamed of love. She was the most enchanting woman (frog) I was ever so lucky to lay my eyes upon. She was as stout and green as a cabbage, and her skin glistened in the luminous moonglow. Her back was streaked with gold and her eyes shone like a new copper penny. She looked like me, but way better. Dare I approach her? I shuddered at the very thought. Who was I, a mere mortal, to ask anything of this divine creature! I felt a peculiar throbbing in my webbed hands and looked down to see my thumbs were swollen with nuptial pads. How could I have forgotten? It was breeding season, a glorious amphibian occasion from which I had always been perversely excluded, locked away in the laboratory. But I was now a free frog. Free to fall in love!
I approached the lovely lady, who was perched alluringly inside a natural hole in the bank of a pond, which was set below a tasteful bunch of Cumbungi reeds. The lady had taste! Suddenly, like a beam of sun emerging from an afternoon haze, her glowing eyes met mine. I hopped to her, my gazed fixed on hers. But suddenly I was overcome with a sharp pain in my thigh. I looked down and saw her froggy jaws had clamped on my right leg. I saw myself as she saw me, as little more than a piece of meat. My first love had become my greatest enemy!
I am not a foolish frog. I know true love is rare and hard to find. I would have even given my love my right leg if it would have meant we could spend our days together in blessed domesticity. 'Tis better to be a one-legged frog in love than to never have loved at all! "The people we love are never just as we desire them," Anne Carson wrote in Eros the Bittersweet. Carson described the concept of eros as a simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain. She lamented that "the main, inevitably boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can." But here I was: a frog who had encountered a love who somehow knew how to dissolve the boundary between flesh and self, you and me. Take my leg, I said to her. Take all of me!
Alas, my love interpreted this message too literally. She wrapped her sticky fingers around my other leg, a sensuous embrace I would have welcomed if it were not an attempt to bring my other leg into her mouth, throat, and stomach. Perhaps a braver frog could love his lady without a body of his own, but as I felt my toes begin to burn in the acid of her stomach, I realized I was not so brave a frog. I still had so much of the world to see! So much of life to taste! I grasped at the vegetation around me, my webbed fingers scratching for a fated foothold. I screeched, let me out, my love! Let me out!
But my love ignored my beseeching; I was thusly dragged into her hole.
I let my body go limp as the light of the moon faded into the darkness of her burrow. If Death had finally come for me, so be it. I had done what no other frog in my laboratory had managed to do. I traveled the world and reveled in the sparkling pleasures of the Earth. I spent my time as I chose, beholden to no man in a white lab coat, trapped by no clear plastic box. And as I lived, I found love—not a mere crush, but an obliterating attachment that seemed to now drag me to an untimely Death. Perhaps I was destined to die this way, to make the Ultimate Sacrifice for Love. What an honor!
As I disappeared into the tunnel, my leg inching deeper into the green guts of my beloved, I shouted into the darkness before me. I love you! I screamed. I love you! I love you! And, as night fell fast over my eyes, I scarcely whispered: Do you love me?
The silence, O, the silence! I heard the trilling crickets, the rustling leaves, the splish-splash of fish in the pond. It was a beautiful nighttime symphony, and I closed my eyes to take it all in. Everyone around me was continuing on this great journey of life, and it had come time for my chapter to close. Breathless, I waited. Would my love answer me?
Suddenly, like a missive from some Dark God, my hand chanced upon a sturdy root. O steadfast Root, my noble steed! I grabbed and, as if ferried on the wings of some gentle angel, flew free from the clutches of my love and her wretched hole. I was a free frog once more!
Not one to chance my luck, I briskly hopped away, my heart pounding like a battle drum. So I was to live another day. But the visage of my beloved was already fading from my mind's eye. Could I go on the rest of my life without a memory of the beautiful face of my love? Was I to become some slimy Eurydice, doomed because I looked back on the land of Death?
You might shake your head at my decision, but I must ask of you: Is it Love if it does not destroy you, hollow you out and leave you bereft of hope for any future? We were put on Earth to ruin ourselves in search of Love, to make a mess of our lives and put ourselves back together in the vain hopes that we may experience such soul-extinguishing pleasure once more. One Great Love was more than a frog like me could ever hope for. If I was to be dragged once more into the hole, it would have all been worth it. So I looked back. And I could have sworn I heard a distant croak—I love you—or was it the whistling in the reeds?
