We Are the Ants

by Shaun David Hutchinson

Life is bullshit. Consider your life for a moment. Think about all those little rituals that sustain you throughout your day—from the moment you wake up until that last, lonely midnight hour when you guzzle a gallon of NyQuil to drown out the persistent voice in your head. The one that whispers you should give up, give in, that tomorrow won’t be better than today. Think about the absurdity of brushing your teeth, of arguing with your mother over the appropriateness of what you’re wearing to school, of homework, of grade-point averages and boyfriends and hot school lunches. And life. Think about the absurdity of life.

When you break down the things we do every day to their component pieces, you begin to understand how ridiculous they are. Like kissing, for instance. You wouldn’t let a stranger off the street spit into your mouth, but you’ll swap saliva with the boy or girl who makes your heart race and your pits sweat and gives you boners at the worst fucking times. You’ll stick your tongue in his mouth or her mouth or their mouth, and let them reciprocate without stopping to consider where else their tongue has been, or whether they’re giving you mouth herpes or mono or leftover morsels of their tuna-salad sandwich.

We shave our legs and pluck our eyebrows and slather our bodies with creams and lotions. We starve ourselves so we can fit into the perfect pair of jeans, we pollute our bodies with drugs to increase our muscles so we’ll look ripped without a shirt. We drive fast and party hard a...

Physicists have theorized that we live in an infinite and infinitely expanding universe, and that everything in it will eventually repeat. There are infinite copies of your mom and your dad and your clothes-stealing little sister. There are infinite copies of you. Despite what you’ve spent your entire life believing, you are not a special snowflake. ...

What’s really going to send you running over the side of the nearest bridge is that none of it matters. I’ll die, you’ll die, we’ll all die, and the things we’ve done, the choices we’ve made, will amount to nothing.

Out in the world, crawling in a field at the edge of some bullshit town with a name like Shoshoni or Medicine Bow, is an ant. You weren’t aware of it. Didn’t know whether it was a soldier, a drone, or the queen. Didn’t care if it was scouting for food to drag back to the nest or building new tunnels for wriggly ant larvae. Until now that ant simply didn’t exist for you. If I hadn’t mentioned it, you would have continued on with your life, pinballing from one tedious task to the next—shoving your tongue into the bacterial minefield of your girlfriend’s mouth, doodling the variations of your combined names on the cover of your notebook—waiting for electronic bits to zoom through the air and tell you that someone was thinking about you. That for one fleeting moment you were the most significant person in someone else’s insignificant life. But whether you knew about it or not, that ant is still out there doing ant things while you wait for the next text message to prove that out of the seven billion self-centered people on this planet, you are important.

Your entire sense of self-worth is predicated upon your belief that you matter, that you matter to the universe. But y...

We spend our first nine months of life floating, weightless and blind, in an amniotic sac before we become gravity’s bitch, and the seductive lure of space travel is the promise of returning to that perfect state of grace. But it’s a sham. Gravity is jealous, sadistic, and infinite.

Sometimes I think gravity may be death in disguise. Other times I think gravity is love, which is why love’s only demand is that we fall.

The universe is more than thirteen billion years old. What is the value of a single kiss compared to that? What is the value of an entire world?

You spend your life hoarding memories against the day when you’ll lack the energy to go out and make new ones, because that’s the comfort of old age. The ability to look back on your life and know that you left your mark on the world.

A person can become a part of you as real as your arm or leg, and even though Jesse is dead, I still feel the weight of that phantom limb. I have a thousand amazing memories of Jesse, but his suicide is leaking into those recollections, poisoning our past. I can hardly remember him without hating him for taking his life and leaving me alone in mine.

Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long dead and buried deep.

How ugly we must look to them, spilling light into every dark corner to push back the shadows, blinding ourselves to the true beauty of emptiness.

I try to tell them there is no mystery. I am not special, not unique, not even a little important. They never listen.

“Why would you want to bring a kid into such a fucked-up world?” “Are you kidding, bro? About the only good thing I can do is bring this kid into the world, give her the best life I can, and believe that she can make it a better place.”

Grief is an ocean, and guilt the undertow that pulls me beneath the waves and drowns me.

As human beings, we seek meaning in everything. We’re so good at discovering patterns that we see them where they don’t exist.

We look for the same patterns in our lives to give them meaning. When someone says, “Everything happens for a reason,” they’re trying to convince you there’s a pattern to your life, and that if you pay close attention, it’s possible to decipher it.

The world pretty much sucks. But the bad shit that happens doesn’t cancel out the good. I mean, a world with people like you in it can’t be totally crap, right?”

We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live.

The universe may forget us, but it doesn’t matter. Because we are the ants, and we’ll keep marching on.