The Fireflies That Weren’t There

This morning I was driving the girls to their grandparents' house. They go there one day a week while I catch up on work, look into home ed projects, make things, write things, occasionally convince myself I'm going to meal prep, and generally attempt to fit an unreasonable number of jobs into the hours before I have to collect them again.

Owl City came on the radio. Fireflies.

And somewhere inside my brain, a tiny door opened.

Thailand. A boat. A dark river. And one of the most underwhelming evenings of my life.

Years ago, I was travelling in Thailand with an ex-boyfriend when I read about the fireflies around Amphawa, along the Mae Klong River and its canals. You could take a little boat out at night and see them gathering in the trees along the banks. I was beside myself. I'd already built the whole thing in my imagination — the boat gliding quietly through the darkness, thousands of tiny lights flickering in the trees, the banks glowing, the water reflecting them, everything magical.

Basically, I had imagined the Owl City song. Except I don't think it had even come out yet. My imagination had simply got there first.

We booked the boat. Night came. Off we went.

And there were no fireflies. Not slightly fewer than I'd hoped for. Not a disappointing scattering. None. I stared into every bush. Nothing. We travelled farther along the river. Nothing. I looked harder, as though the fireflies might be there but required some advanced level of concentration to see. Still nothing. Just dark trees, dark water, dark bushes, and me, becoming increasingly furious with nature.

I was absolutely gutted. There was no beautiful acceptance of the moment, no perhaps the real magic was simply being on the river at night. I had come for illuminated shrubbery, and I wanted illuminated shrubbery. The boat carried on. I kept staring accusingly into vegetation that steadfastly refused to perform. And that was that.

What's strange is how completely I'd forgotten about it, until this morning. There must be hundreds of memories from that trip that have disappeared entirely — meals I ate, people I met, streets I walked down, whole days probably gone. Yet apparently my brain carefully preserved the one evening some insects failed to turn up.

Then, years later, I'm driving through Lancashire with my daughters in the back of the car, and a song comes on the radio, and suddenly I'm there again. On a little boat in Thailand. Young me, staring into a bush, still waiting for it to sparkle.

Memory is peculiar like that. It doesn't always keep the grand things. Sometimes it keeps the tiny disappointments — the meal that was terrible, the view hidden by cloud, the place you travelled miles to see only to find it closed. The fireflies that never arrived.

And perhaps that's why I like this memory more now than I did then. Not because I've turned it into some great lesson about expectations. I haven't. If I went back tomorrow, I'd still very much like the bloody fireflies to show up. But I love that the memory was there all along, quietly tucked away — a Thai river, a little boat, an old boyfriend, some stubbornly dark bushes, and a younger version of me who desperately wanted the world to put on a show. All of it hidden inside one song, waiting for an entirely ordinary morning to come floating back.

The fireflies never appeared. But somehow, the memory still glows.