This story haunted me for two years before I finally got it out. It taught me that if I can’t stop thinking about something, I should probably start writing it down. Pay attention to your ghosts.

It is innocuous and normal to think, “I miss my friend, I hope that I see her again, maybe we’ll patch things up,” but when it turns out the friend has passed away . . . well it’s still normal to miss them, anyway. Less so, when their posthumous letter says “trust me,” to actually trust them. I think it’s also unfortunately normal to still have regrets and what ifs. What if I had reached out sooner, or at all? Did they know how much I cared?

I started my writing journey with poems. I think mostly in poetry when creating, though I believe different stories crave different styles and structures. My favourite things to read, or be inspired by, use a perfect blend of prose and poetic techniques. And I try my best to listen to the story I am working on, its different parts, and do whatever they demand of me.

When I wrote the story, I didn’t want the insects to anchor too closely to any singular real-world equivalent; in fact I went back and forth a few times with how they worked, changing their logistics and building in some of the in-world fallout of having bees as a fundamental fact of life, in order to keep them from drifting closer to being one clear metaphor or another (because I found that drifting very easy to do!) Being a woman is a lot of things, personally and interpersonally, societally, and I wanted the bees to be a lot of things too.