The Sting

Some memories don’t just stay with us, they press into us, weighing through the years like centuries of silence straining to speak through our bones. I like to think of that day as my earliest memory, though I know that’s a lie. But some lies are softer to hold, easier to swallow than the truth, which gnaws at us slowly until it spits us out half-formed and raw. Or maybe it’s because certain moments leave their fingerprints on us, stitching themselves into our skin as if to say: this is where it all began. So here it is; my beginning.

I remember that day, hot, dusty and golden, not so much for what happened, but for what it meant, though I didn’t realize that until years later. We were all gathered in front of my grandparents’ little shop in the Macedonian countryside. That shop, tiny, aging, and cluttered,  was the axis around which my childhood spun. Before they retired and closed it for good, it was the warmest place I knew, even when the tiles inside were cool and the buzzing refrigerator hummed like an old lullaby. The shop smelled of sun-warmed plastic, cheap gum, instant coffee, and vanilla. I never had to ask for anything there since I was the granddaughter. The favorite, or so I liked to believe. I used to lean against the side wall, cone in hand, watching the world idle past. My fingers always got sticky from the melting ice cream, and the ants always found their way toward my shoes. I should’ve minded. But I didn’t. It was summer, and the air shimmered with heat and stillness, and I was too full of sugar and wonder to care.

My mother sipped her coffee beside me, sip by sip, slowly, like time itself was something you could savor. The other women sat around her in plastic chairs, half in sun, half in shade, gossiping, shelling beans, laughing loud enough to echo off the cracked pavement. They were sunburnt and strong and always had something to say. That scene felt unchangeable, like it had existed long before I was born and would last long after I left.

Then, all of a sudden, outside of my imagination, a bee stung my eyelid.

I know, it sounds small. It was small. But I remember it so clearly, not because of the pain, but because of what came after. I must’ve been ten or eleven, still living in a body that hadn’t yet been taught fear. That morning, I ran barefoot through the garden like I could outrun the wind itself, like I was racing toward something invisible and glorious. I wasn’t running from anything. Just running for something like joy, motion, for the sheer ecstasy of being alive.

I saw the bee on my glasses before it stung me. It sat there calmly, a little golden miracle with velvet wings and stripes like tiny warning signs. I stared at it, fascinated. I didn’t know yet that beauty could bite. But then, it did. And it wasn’t the pain that stayed with me - it was the shift. The betrayal of something lovely. The fear creeping in after the fact. One moment I was a child playing in the sun. The next, I was blinking back tears and stumbling toward my grandmother’s arms, no longer invincible. That sting was the first time I felt fragile. In my culture, there’s a saying: “If you have it good, put a stone in your shoe to remind you of hardship.” I never understood that as a child. Why ruin a good thing on purpose?

But life doesn’t always wait for you to put the stone there. Sometimes, it does the job for you. After that, I hated bugs. Not just bugs, really, anything that moved too fast or had wings. But fear didn’t stop there. It multiplied. Slowly, other stings came. The first time my parents fought so loudly I had to plug my ears. The first time I realized that love might not always mean kindness. The first time a boy told me he liked me, only to disappear the moment I said it back. The first time someone looked at me like I was too much, and not enough, all at once. Each of those moments was its own kind of sting. Not dramatic. Not fatal. Just sharp. Lingering. Unavoidable. I didn’t always connect them to that first bee sting. Not at first. But eventually, I started to notice the pattern, the unraveling that begins with one small tear in the fabric of belief. First, you stop trusting bees. Then, people. Then yourself. I think that’s when I started writing. Not formally, not in any grand sense. But in notebooks, in margins, on scraps of paper. Writing became a place to hold the stings, to study them, to transform them into something I could name. It was a way of remembering, what hurt, what healed, what made me feel seen. And sometimes, it was the only place where things made sense. My first poem, I remember, was more of a confession than an epic story to be framed.

Later, when my grandfather died, suddenly, brutally, I returned to that sting. That night, after we got the call, I sat in the dark while my mother sobbed quietly across the room. I felt nothing. Or maybe I felt too much to name. And in the days that followed, as grief settled in like fog over the hills behind our house, I found myself scribbling lines I didn’t understand. They weren’t poems or stories. Just fragments. But they were mine. I think at that point, having something physical to name “mine” was all that mattered. Elena Prendozva, a Macedonian slam poet, once told me that writing a poem is like giving birth, it no longer belongs to you. It grows its own wings, finds its own voice, and carves out its own place in the world. I’ve come to believe that this doesn’t just apply to poetry. Our interactions with others - words exchanged, moments shared - also take flight beyond us. They live on independently, shaped by memory, interpretation, and time.

I remember the time I told someone I loved them, and they just looked at me, kind, soft, distant, and said, “I don’t think I feel the same.” And I had to nod, to swallow that sting, to go home and fold laundry and pretend I didn’t just bleed out quietly in someone’s kitchen. That’s the thing about growing up: you learn to carry pain without spilling it.

Still, not all stings are cruel. Some wake you up. Some show you where it hurts so you can finally tend to it. And maybe that’s what writing became for me; a kind of salve. A way to trace the shape of my wounds until they felt like stories, not just scars.

Even now, when I’m scared about the future, about whether I’ll succeed or fall apart trying, I go back to that shop. In my mind, it’s still there. The heat still rises from the pavement. The women still laugh in the shade. My younger self still races barefoot through the garden, believing she’s faster than the wind. And though she doesn’t know it yet, she’ll be stung. But she’ll get back up. She’ll squint against the sun, and she’ll remember the feeling of before, even as she learns to live in the after.

And maybe that’s what literacy really is, not just the ability to read or write, but the capacity to read our lives, to make sense of their shifting syntax, to translate pain into something usable. A kind of quiet fluency in being human.

So yes, I was stung. But I’m still here. Still learning. Still writing. Still soft, but no longer naïve. Still believing that even the smallest story, if told honestly, can offer healing. Or at the very least, a little understanding.