“I’m not a fucking cricket!” she shouted.

Of course you’re not, I remember thinking at the time. Crickets only talk in Disney cartoons, or when I go without sleep for too many days. Then they’re damnably chatty, and surprisingly lucid. But this is real life, and I’m rested. You’re not a cricket.

Now, however, months later, I anxiously wonder what she was trying to tell me. Although I recall her words and my internal dialogue clearly, the point of our conversation completely eludes me, much like the meaning of my life. Her statement seems like a non sequitur. Bizarre, even.

What was she trying to say?

I should ask her.

But I’m too embarrassed to admit I don’t know. Maybe this cricket thing was important to her. Maybe it was the single most important circumstance of her life. I don’t want my forgetfulness to crush her spirit. I must figure it out for myself.

I’m not a fucking cricket!

There are only two possible explanations.

The first — the most improbable — is that she is, despite appearances to the contrary, a cricket, but a non-fucking cricket. A cricket who does not fuck. A celibate cricket. The Mother Teresa of crickets. Or, more fancifully, the Sister Bertrille of crickets, the flying nun-cricket. A flying nun-cricket who has happily abandoned corporeal lust and consecrated her virginity and eternal soul to the prayerful service of Christ.

It is not difficult for me to imagine a tiny flying nun-cricket wearing a miniature habit and outlandishly aerodynamic white cornette, although her rosary beads would have to be very small, almost molecular in scale. Still, in a world filled with impossibilities discovered and yet to be discovered, I believe it may be possible for a cricket to become a flying nun-cricket. To be devoutly religious.

Faith, like love, knows no bounds.

What’s harder to accept is that a cricket would take a vow of celibacy.

Crickets are simple creatures. They live to eat. To scare men, women and children by leaping out of the shadows. But more than anything, they live to mate.

That loud chirping noise crickets make? Male crickets create it by rubbing their forewings together. It’s a primordial courtship ritual designed to attract the attention of female crickets in the same way that teenage boys often shout and wave their arms wildly to get the attention of girls at the mall.

It works, too.

Foreplay between a pair of Hawaiian crickets can last up to 8 hours. It consists of eight to 15 transfers of capsules between their bodies, with only the final capsule containing the sperm that impregnates the female. I’ve seen videos, and they’re sexually graphic. Dirty enough to make a porn star blush. Crickets may be the most amorous, free-loving creatures on God’s green earth.

No! A celibate nun-cricket is not possible.

Some crickets might be religious, even deeply religious, but they’re Protestants, not Catholics. Self-controlled or reserved in their sexual expression, perhaps, but never chaste like a nun.

She isn’t a non-fucking nun-cricket. No way.

I’m not a fucking cricket!

Only one other explanation remains.

She was angry. Afraid. Railing against a fearsome and inevitable metamorphosis from woman to cricket.

Something similar was detailed by Franz Kafka, the infamously morose Czech writer who described how a common working man slowly became a cockroach because of the dehumanizing, demoralizing nature of his job. Kafka was a government employee, brilliant but trapped in a mundane existence, and irrevocably despondent about the absurdity and hopelessness of his life, and life in general. She is also a government employee, similarly gifted and underutilized. Could it be that her emotional outburst was her way of telling me she sees parallels between Kafka’s life and her own? That she is becoming a cricket, just as he became a cockroach?

Perhaps.

But who reads Kafka’s work literally? Who reads Kafka’s stories at all, except for university professors and their academically servile students, who believe literature must be filled with obscure metaphors and dark ruminations in order to be judged great? Kafka may be a talented writer, but he is no Stephen King or Janet Evanovich. He’s dull, and depressing. He holds little, if any, sway over modern readers, and for good reason.

I’m not a fucking cricket!

I cannot make sense of it. I will have to either try to ignore it, or muster the courage to risk offending her by asking what she meant.

I do not know what to do.

I will never know what to do.