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Bored
So. Here I am. Sitting here. Sitting. Doing nothing. Just sitting. On a lawn chair. Breathe in: 1...2... Breathe out: 3...4... A really uncomfortable lawn chair. One of those hard-plastic-molded ones that your legs stick to when you’re wearing shorts and when you try to get unstuck there’s a smacking sound of behind-the-knees skin tearing itself away from sun-burned polymer. Look. Over there. No, not there. There. It’s a little ant. Not a carpenter ant, and not even a medium sized ant, but a little ant. One that you wouldn’t normally see unless you were just sitting here. Which I’m doing. He’s just crawling in and out of the spaces in the patio trying to get from one place to another with a constant goal in mind. That’s the only point of his life, you know. To get from one place to another. To gather food so that he and the rest of the ants can live. It must be a boring life. All you think about is survival. And how if you don’t work, you won’t survive. But you know you won’t be able to survive the work. It must be a hard life. To be an ant. Trapped into the tedious job of constant food scouting, the search for necessities. To know that someday it will all end. Dodging human sneakers 5,237 times your size. Continually aware that any moment, any single moment, your life could be snuffed out just like that and what’s left of your meager little existence could be squooshed flat-as-a-pancake on the sun-scorched pavement. What a trial. To be an ant. To be responsible for everyone else. To have other people responsible for you. Hello Mr. Ant, how are you today? He doesn’t have time to talk now. He has to work. I see him rushing off to his hill. Climbing over obstacles everywhere he goes. But not once does he lose the crumb on his back that I know could be 50 times his weight and he would still carry it all the way from the kitchen that he got it in when it fell off of the counter on which a teenager was making a peanut butter and banana sandwich back to his pregnant wife and 28 children in the ant hill on the other side of the fence next to the vegetable/herb garden. His infinite burden. He must keep going. He must not disappoint the others. His family is counting on him. Ever watchful. Someone comes out of the house. I know this because I can hear the screen door bang shut and the sound of big feet clonking down the three rotting wooden steps. I watch in calm, restrained horror as the busy little laborer disappears, never to be seen again, under the trespasser’s size 11 shoe. "Dinner will be ready in an hour." Waiting. I give no response. The screen door slams shut again. The little ant that I had, in my heart, so desperately mourned for only a moment ago, the slaving little worker, sneaks up from between the minuscule crack that was hiden below the messenger’s foot. His clever trick has given him one more day to add to his memories. Amazingly, the crumb is still on his back. He goes off to his family. Sun-singed chair. Heavy, humid air. Legs falling asleep with lack of circulation. Yup. It’s pretty boring around here. Just "sittin’ and thinkin’." Lisa Game, 1999 |