Proofs

In the afternoon I reach a point, many days, when I have to lock my computer up, push the chair back from the desk, exit the cube and the building and go to the river. It's only across the street.

Today I walked along the riverwalk. There were tall, small-blossomed magenta colored flowers growing up from the water level, with large spiderwebs strung in-between. There was the submerged shopping cart, the same one that's been there for years, looking like an Atlantic wreck, minus the blind fishes of crush-depth.

I wandered by the huge tree I don't know the name of--leaves look like aspen but I don't know about that. The bark is impossibly craggy and thick, like the kind of rough ironwork you see in museums that speaks of tonnes. Huge black ants clambered up and down the exterior, not doing anything apparent, maybe guarding, maybe on their lunch break.

Underneath the bridge, where I always look upward and remember scenes from The Host, there was nothing but girders and shadows. I leaned on the concrete wall for a moment, looking down at the unhealthy water, remembering how it almost covered this wall at flood stage.

I ambled back, sweating. The sun is such a presence in August, like someone in the room who has finally stopped tapping their foot and approached you, grabbed you by the jaw and forced you to acknowledge their jurisdiction. That's when I stopped and looked over at the grapevine tendrils bobbing in the breeze, hanging off the trees that are hanging off the embankment.

Some kind of insect eggs had warbled and curled and ruined the smaller leaves. Interesting. I could see the orange and black of some small beetle hiding just inside one of the curls. Interesting. And then...

In between the tiniest of the tendrils there were spiderwebs again, two of them, except so tiny as to be almost invisible, and yet exactly in the style of the big ones. And in the center of each web: a spider like a dust mote, sitting, waiting.

I may be the first and last person to witness those particular creatures living their simple, intense, microcosmic lives. Both of them had eyes, and some miniscule matrix of a mind organizing the movement of their atoms into a purpose. And both would have lived, hunted, mated, and died completely unknown to us, completely unwitnessed, their effect upon the universe unfelt but actual, unnoticed but irreplaceable.