Day 57. Ants.

our assignment was to sit alone, completely alone, for forty-five minutes, and then write for ten. most people wrote deep reflections about childhood, or individuality, or aloneness. I wrote mine on ants. (like a pro)

I'm sitting on the curb of an empty parking lot. I'm thinking that empty parking lots are pretty good metaphors for waste. Unfulfillment. Land razed. Raw ground stamped down with asphalt. Just a waiting wasteland. Life pulls at the edges. The fallen leaves ferment into soil, and there are always ants.
Oh fuck, I just sat on like thirty of them. They are going in a line all along the curb but right where i sat they're scattering, milling around in frenetic circles. I'm their natural disaster. Maybe some of them will question their ant religion.
Fuck. Now I have to move again, for like the sixth time, which makes me feel like one of the frantic ants instead of a person trying to write. I wish i was the kind of person that loved ants. Not even ants in particular-- just everything. The kind of person who can talk about your spirit animal and interconnectedness in the same breath as humming the Lion King. The kind of person who lets bugs scurry over them like raindrops, or snowflakes, like ants are the unavoidable weather of the insect world. But there is currently a prickling sensation all over my body, so, you know, I'm not quite there yet. No matter how much I tell myself that every living thing has value, ants piss me off. They're limitless, for one thing. There are just too many per square inch. Kinda like us. My theory is that ants remind us of us. Our shadows are made of their dark bodies. Here, they seem to say in their winding trails, here is where laws and civilizations have brought us.
Once, I hid an Easter egg in the garage. Bright pink. It didn't get found, not that day anyway. I guess it was a week later that I saw it, cracked and rotting, imprinted with the tire tread of our car. The ants swarmed. They radiated out from the yellow-brown-pink fragments like the egg was a sun, or a god.