To the ten baby spiders I murdered in the shower
I am sorry that you are gone.
I am sorry that you have washed down the drain.
I am sorry that I had no second thoughts as I wielded over you the power of life and death.
I am sorry that those streams of water so ruthlessly chased you as you tried in vain to escape, to live, to not drown.
I am sorry that life gave me so much and you so little, leaving you fragile and defenseless against the finitely more powerful forces it gave to humanity.
I am sorry that you were where you were when I was where I was, that fate chose you to be in my path as I murdered you just so you would get out of my way, away from my skin.
I am sorry that I stole your right to a future, a future where you could have lived in so much more harmony with nature than I ever can, a future that would have by design been only for the good of all and without any harm to the world, a future that I could never live up to.
I am sorry that I was not brave enough to simply allow you to continue on your journey as I continued on mine, that I did what I did even as I said sorry over and over in my head, even as I saw you were all heading up, even as I admired your tenacity, your struggles against the pouring liquid, gripping the smooth surface of the bathtub in an effort not to be washed away.
I am sorry that I took away what was yours.
I am sorry that I snuffed out your life.
None of this does anything to change it. Your potential and your energies are no longer here, no longer yours. Your brethren on the other side of the bathtub, far away from where you lived and died, still survive to carry on your legacy; I watched as they, a safe distance away, climbed up the walls, singleminded in their efforts to leave the dangerous watery zone.
What little mercy we humans have is nothing in the long run. I thought to myself, if only you had been somewhere else; but it is truly us who invaded your home.
It came to my mine that old story of the itsy bitsy spider, who embarked on a journey up a water spout, whose determination to live echoes so vehemently with your own, but who lives on in immortality, whose tale is infinite, circling ever back like the cruel fate of Sisyphus. But that tenacity is nothing, nothing that I can learn from, and the fact that the cycle is broken with your mortality is nothing in the face of the simplicity that blankets all life. You are nothing, I am nothing, we are all Nothing. Your death is not a tragedy, not a lesson to be learned from, not the first ripple that echoes waves into history. It is just another sentence in a billion chapters of an unfinished story. Mostly harmless.
