I have been trying very hard, these past few hours, to remember something.

A few months ago I walked out into a hallway. It was late. I don’t know what time it was. That’s not what I have been trying to remember.

There was a moth laying on the hard wood floor. The light from up above was shining down on this insect and this insect was dying. Moths are positively photoactic. This moth was no exception. It needed that light like it had never needed anything in its life. I don’t know why it wanted that light. But I’m not looking for an explanation. That’s not what I have been trying to remember.

The moth’s blood flowed through its body and into its wings. The wings twitched. One wing was broken. The other was not broken. I don’t know which wing was broken. That’s not what I have been trying to remember.

This animal was writhing and this animal was alive. Its wings and body were the dusted brown of a polluted sunset. I don’t know what species of moth it was. That’s not what I have been trying to remember.

I stared at this creature for a long time. It was miserable. The light shone down. The moth wanted up. Up, the direction it had always been able to go at will; the direction its mind had been programmed by hundreds of millions of years of evolution to know it could always travel in. It wanted to lift off the ground, and slip through the air like the ghost of a dancer, gathering dust on its soft wings of downy as they propel its curved body higher and upwards and outwards and higher. More than that. It knew it could, and had no reason to believe otherwise. It wanted to feel the light, to press its body against the warm glass, for reasons human science has yet to explain. But I was hardly interested in the reasons. That’s not what I have been trying to remember.

I contemplated my options for a long time, and the purposes behind those options. I thought about them with density and to great length. There were two options. I remember them very well. That’s not what I have been trying to remember.

I could leave the moth there, to finish out its life in a nightmare of punishment demanded by brutal, natural order it had the capacity neither to recognize, understand, nor control. Humans can recognize it. Humans cannot understand it. Humans cannot control it. I know this. That’s not what I’ve been trying to remember.

I could kill the moth and end its misery, and stamp out its frail gelatinous form and along with it that searing shard of unwavering hope that burns beneath its wooly skin and behind its hundreds of black, listless eyes. I know where the shard came from. That’s not what I have been trying to remember.

There is no way I can know what the moth would want me to do even if it did have the mental capacity to comprehend this riddle. All the same, I breathlessly whisper the question into the air currents, as if it were a private evil or a notorious profanity.

I have been trying to remember my decision. And yet, I examined both angles with such intellectual ferocity that I can even now feel the moth’s infrastructure splintering under my bare foot just as strongly as I can see and hear the moth convulsing in agony against the cold varnished wood as the last sense before I walk away and shut the door.

I have forgotten my decision. I have been trying to remember it. And I have been trying to forget the reason I have been trying to remember.

In that, at least, I have succeeded.