Ants

There’s a hole in the midst of your ocean and you don’t know how it got there. Water is pouring into it at an alarming rate. You want as much water as you can but it leaves faster than you can measure it. The hole might be growing, you can’t be sure. The point is it needs to be patched up. So you build. Through the nerve tendons in your brain stream thousands of little blue synapses: a colony of ethereal ants crawling back and forth, tiptoeing on the flowing surface of the ocean like messiahs and miracle working beast-fighters. They scavenge the depths of the seas and the heights of the skies for loose scraps of matter—twigs and stones and mud and sand. They paste it all together with their saliva, making bridges across the widening hole in the ocean, trying to seal the gap that may or may not be there at all because every one of the ants is covered in eyes but every eye is blind either because it cannot receive light or there is not light to receive. So they struggle on and extend their crumbling structures over miles of void, searching for a friend to meet them in the middle. But how often do their structures swing astray and bring them back to the same patch of ocean where they once were before but now much farther down, because building on water that is moving downwards, even with the speed and fanaticism they employ, is a risky business and will generally result in not only a blatant lack of architectural foundation but also a significant decrease in elevation as time swirls on. So when the structures get too far down the ants working on them are lost to the howling darkness along with gallons and gallons of water every fraction of a second. Until you’re not just losing water anymore. You’re losing your memories, that were strapped in little heaps of rotting vegetable matter to the backs of the blue insects that now fall to their doom. Their cobwebs still stretch across the expanse, but seldom do they meet the other side and when they do it only causes more destruction. So you’re not done yet. No, you can’t give up. You’ve already tried to give up and discovered you can’t. So you think, letting the creatures scurry around inside you from one side of the ocean to the next, to all ends of the compass and all curves of the world inside you until you know what to try next and you don’t want to try it but what choice do you have? You realize that you can’t build on the water. It’s moving too fast and it’s water. You have to dive. So down the little monsters go. They let the tides pull them near the hole and then they slip beneath the waves and wriggle their spindly legs trying to find purchase in a liquid medium they weren’t designed to navigate. And they find purchase, but not before most of them are drowned and floating up again and being sucked into the hole. But some of them keep going. They move downwards, ever downwards, and if they could see then they would notice how dark it all is, that deep under the water, even though it remains to be determined if it were just as dark on the surface of the ocean. But they can’t think about that. No, they can’t think at all. All they do is follow your commands like good and noble soldiers. They plunge ever downward, their blue carapaces saturated in the pressure of the deep, searching for a rocky bottom, so that it might be discovered, at long last, where the hole is, what the hole is in, what precisely the hole is a lack of. But if the glowing electric-blue snowdrops crawling deeper in the water never hit bottom, how can they patch the hole? If there is no bottom to be found, how can there be a hole at all? Or rather, how can there be an ocean? Because if there is no bottom, then all is a hole. But if all is a hole then why does the ocean collapse in one specific location? Questions swim in your mind as the ants drown. Their brine-inflated corpses are carried away past the event horizon of the hole and you can no longer command them, and the packs on their strong little backs holding miniscule percentiles of your character and your memories and your sanity are once again lost along with the bearers. You want to cry for them but you know they are just insects, and crying for each one would take years that you do not have nor desire to have, so you let them die and try to keep smiling. It’s the little ones that get you. When one is lost at a time. A fleet of insects is a terrible thing to see gone, but it becomes an event and an experience and as such it can be brooded on, concluded, and then swept behind. But the death of a single insect is something to be cherished, the moment during which your heart begins to feel the strain of its many restless beats catching up to it, the moment when your lungs breathe cold and your stomach twists and your eyes curl up and spit out their sides and your legs begin to buckle and gravity begins to collect its stacking interest. So keep sending them and keep spiraling farther in your thoughts and around your ears looking for the source of the hole or the location of the hole or building boats to sail away from the hole or lighthouses to see the hole that just spew more slimy darkness into the fog. Feel as the creatures burrow and twist in new ways, leaving behind fungus and clouds and chunks of brain matter that smell after two or three weeks. You command them as they tunnel and as they search and as they scratch and bore through the piles of unread literature making their way over time toward soil and earthy grass-fodder, but the one thing you can never never never command them to do is stop.