The Fly

 
I found it while getting ready to sweep, lying on its back with legs curled skyward. Next to the sliding glass door, mere inches away from the freedom of outside. 

Dead.

What's the lifespan of a fly? A quick online search tells me a couple weeks to a month. Maybe up to 50 days, at most. I give up, closing the browser as my brain starts doing the weird thing it does from time to time, treading a path to places I don't care for, yet find myself in nonetheless. 

50 days? That sounded a bit optimistic... we'll say a month. Average. How long was this nuisance careening through the apartment, randomly dive-bombing my son and I while we went through our day? Well, definitely more than a week... little man is with me 50% of the time, 7 days on and 7 off, and it had been annoying me for a while before that.

Okay, so the fucker spent at least half of its life in the prison of my shitty bachelor pad.

But it's just a fly, right? 

Who cares?


Except...

What was that story about fate and time travel? The series of events that snowballed, cascading from virtually irrelevant to world changing just by stepping on a butterfly while the characters explored a prehistoric Earth?

This dead little husk could have flown into the mouth of someone on their way to work, causing them to plow into a pedestrian on their morning walk, altering both lives forever.

Damn, that's a grim thought. 

What about if it was that little bit of extra food a lizard needed to survive long enough to be found and kept as the 'greatest pet ever' for some lonely child, desperate for connection, a life for that kid to care for in the exact moment they needed it most?

...or maybe just to be swept up and forgotten, decaying in my garbage, never having had the opportunity to serve its sole purpose in life.

What.

The.

Fuck.

I need to stop typing and do something else.

A Sky full of Ghosts

 A Sky full of Ghosts

Vertigo washes over me when I look up. Before my eyes is something so vast it can only be described as... eternity.

Awe, bone deep and absolute, springs from a long abandoned place of my mind, some nook reserved for things long forgotten.

I took my early years for granted, the sheer magnificence of the night sky was simply part of rural life. The darkness was sharp, the sky a pristine black devoid of clouds... like an open window to the endless ocean of stars beyond.

I watched a youtube video once that said many stars we see are actually dead, their light nothing more than a glimpse into the past when they still lived. The astronomer William Herschel referred to the universe as "a sky full of ghosts".

I guess it really is eternity.