One of many shells floating in the pool. It was from seeing these that I knew that even though he'd broken off part of one leg, and it probably hurt, it wasn't an urgent situation, because apparently inside the shell they have another set of legs waiting to develop. The whole thing was so bizarre... It got more so as time passed. As I sat hunched over him watching every tiny little change, he began to have like convulsions. As though he was flexing new parts of his self, and he'd flex to one side, then he'd arch his back. Then he'd rest. Again and again he'd flex thus. His bloated abdomen would arch upwards, curling back almost to his wings, and inside this pudding-like mass I could detect movement of some sort, as though whatever kind of new skeleton was growing, was also flexing. And I thought, humans too, go through a stage where days, or a week or two after fertilization occurs, we're a pudding-like mass of life. And it began to seem to me that this pudding already has an intelligence within it, which is utterly foreign to my thought, but this intelligence is able to, within this pudding, organize everything so that this mush joins with this mush, and with that, and begins to grow into something quite un-pudding- like. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that scientists were toying with the idea of storing computer information in a liquid instead of on a chip or disk, and I remembered thinking how the fuck do you extract information from a liquid? I mean, when you put clean water into clean water, the two mix so that, what? You can still tell where the two separate waters are? I thought they mix so, not thoroughly, but so completely, that you can no longer tell. Like air mixing with air... So how would you retrieve information out of a soup like that? But apparently soup and mush and puddings are quite capable of organizational feats which I'd never considered before. It was, mind boggling. All this time, this bug was doing his flexing. Sometimes he'd just move his head a little bit this way and that.
Much later I decided that he can do this without me watching...
I said good night to him. Told him I still want the photos of him finally emerging, so please wait until I get up before doing the BIG PUSH. And I went to bed.

Days later, he'd dried quite nicely, well enough to discard the dry shell, I thought. But, apparently, he dried inside with the shell. Nothing ever happened. He never emerged as a dragon fly, nor as a damsel fly. For over a week I kept checking on him to see if anything at all was changing. But, no.

I don't know if it was the coldness of the nights that killed him. Or if it was my interference with a process which I knew nothing of. Could've been both. Watching a change like this is one thing. Taking an active part in it not knowing what's what, is very human, but, unsatisfactory. All the experiments done in the name of science throughout history should've reminded me of that. And it was constantly in the back of my mind. But the curiosity, the wanting to know, to see...