There were dragonflies

I dropped my groceries on the sidewalk, my self-pity settling between the milk and the peanut butter.
A ten-foot stretch of sidewalk was swarming with dragonflies. They were three inches long, heavy and loud insects dancing around to the insane rattling of the cicadas. I looked around and stepped into the whirlwind, wondering if I might be sucked up or turned into a whizzing insect, but nothing happened. They buzzed and bolted, zipped and even crashed into each other in a sexually aggressive way.
I come from the country, not the city, but finding this little piece of odd nature in Chicago surprised me. It further surprised me that it did not seem to surprise anyone else. No one else seemed to really notice the frenetic cloud of fat bugs, or they shrugged it off as, "Gee, that's a lot of dragonflies."
When I stepped into the cloud of dragonflies I had that sad, clear moment of life which occurs out on the edges where the air is thinner.  I did not cast off my own suffering as false, but I shrugged it off for a moment. For a moment there were only dragonflies, there was only this strange phenomenon happening on someone's lawn next to my forgotten bags.
I am a privileged, middle-class white American woman. I have not known hardship until recently, and I am still often ashamed to count myself among the ranks of those suffering. I am embarrassed to suffer when I have hot running water, access to medication, and enough food for the month in my pantry alone. But I have had to learn that my own pain, while different, is nevertheless real.
The more aware I become of my own suffering, the more I see who is exploiting me or turning me into an object, the more pain I feel. Yet this pain is tinged with a weary understanding of the stories around me, a solidarity with strangers I have yet to meet. My struggle, however weak or superficial-seeming, with depression has nevertheless given me new ears and a new language.
Standing among the dragonflies, cradling a knot of pain somewhere in my body, I felt the dichotomous paradox of being both connected and isolated. The dragonflies exist in a world beyond the veil, a world which I can sometimes visit when I have been wounded or when I have been awed. It is a world that pulls me away from my own self and turns outward, with shared experiences and shared language. It is bittersweet.