My Friend The Fly

There's a tiny room in my house, it's a little downstairs lavatory. We've decorated it nicely with things that remind us of holidays and ancestors in the West of Ireland and it's really quite lovely.  All the same, it's still a toilet and not somewhere to linger too long.

It's a very hot day today. 30C degrees which is completely out of character for my country. Yes my country...my poor little once great country which had dignity even in oppression because we were steadfast. We were cast down many's the time but never defeated. We always had the dignity of our own mind not to jump off the precipice just because the lemmings were doing so.

Well anyway, it's a hot day and I'm in my little bathroom giving it a clean.  It's so hot I'm stifling even though the window is wide open because there's no cross breeze.  I'm hurrying to get back outside into the shade where it's cool and fresh.

I notice that a huge fly has managed to come indoors and is flying around my tiny, stifling room so I stop to watch him for a while. The window is wide open and he can fly out any time he likes but he instead keeps smashing himself into the wall in this stuffy stagnant place.  Outside there's the fresh peace of freedom.  Outside the air is cool and he can soar with the peace that only truth can give.

The greeny walls of this stifling bathroom are not true, it's fake...a painted effect which makes him feel like he's free and outdoors when really he's imprisoned.  Nobody is keeping him in that place, he's choosing to stay stifled and unhappy, smashing himself into the green wall convincing himself that he's free.  Convincing himself that he's master of the cess which is appropriate here. He flies near that wide open window towards release, towards the true joy of one free but he refuses to go out. I've tried to coax him out because I feel sorry for him in his voluntary prison watching the corpses of the other dead flies too proud or too stupid to fly out that window. Dead and lifeless. Because there is nothing so hopeless as one who refuses to be free.

But he won't go.

He's almost human-like in his obstinance.  So human I think he should have a human name.

Enda is a good name.  I think I'll name my fly friend Enda.