#ladybugsphilosophy

[thefinishpiece]

Ladybug’s Philosophy

We are losing sight of seeing.

Seeing the clear, the streakless. The constant stars in the sky, their pure patterns moving in the same direction to the same placement—every hour, every year, forever. For all the ends time brings, it is dubiously obsessed with perpetuation.

But how could you see?

Hours as trails of glowing dust, leaking across space, dabbing the horizon in splotches of once was and had been—what was it? Maybe nothing. Dressed in costume and consumed by parade, the way an empty vessel still whistles in the wind, or how a hole in the ground feeds home to rain.

Without seeing above its rim, how can you say for sure it is truly empty?

Here on this muddy planet, we see only our surroundings, but when we look up, there is an endless void of air we can never touch or sense. Yet we assure ourselves we are not vacant—that this stone-casted orb is full of life and love and water. Of all things, water.

Surely, they must be laughing at us. Who? Those gargoyles of mockery, who seethe upon their stoop an attitude of candid contempt, thrusting us into a world of game and trickery, which we experience as pain and misery, and then they expect us to laugh with them. But we only weep. They must enjoy seeing that.

There is not a one discernible, indivisible force behind all this—we see this because the only difference between one and two is reflection. Add another mirror, suddenly you have three. Repeat this symmetrical discourse to infinite bounds, suddenly you have a universe.

Why is it true and false?

We are sparkling in wonder. But in the black void of time, I imagine we are barely noticed. If the only difference between light and dark is off and on, then the only similarity between truth and lie is everything in between. Shadows of shadows of shadows.

Venus sighed.

When Mars only died.

Though we fight the war, we return to barren lives. Even galaxies slaughter each other. Gigantic rips in space and time, swelling up in to cosmic scabs, burying everything around it in feverish oblivion, until by its own scope it falls apart and twists an entire spectrum of reality into nothing more than a spiraling oddity—of which we, vases of water, observe safely through our telescopes, inventions of scaled sight. We have seen galaxies brought to ruin. But we still forget our anniversaries and our gifts.

Soaring above us all, those divine demons, whom separated the unifying particle into infinite pieces, the pie that gave birth to this delicious creation; and I am sure they tasted each of their slices with an appetite unmeasured. But we choke on crumbs. Just leave us alone. Yet we are not blind.

You are so close, however.

Your view is quivering like ladybugs on a leaf in a rainstorm, each drop flinging her carapace up and down, straining the veiny-hand which binds her to meaningful position, until at last it snaps, and she plunges to the nonsense of gravity. Wait. She has wings!

They explode from her delicate shell and she hovers across an unseeable grid, a line through X and Y and Z, which appears to us not as mathematics but as magic, as miracle—the sterilized of us define it as nature, while the gods claim it as fortune. Either way, she does what she does, born to do it, dead without it, and thank all the fake heavens she has it!

You think your vision is permanently fading.

It will never completely disappear, but instead, it will remain forever smeared in obscurity. A continuous phase of detachment. An enchantment whose words never finish, they just linger on in vocal venality, waiting to be bought by a final period and ended by mistaken identity—the method of replacing one letter with another, without changing the meaning, as if truth could be writ the same as lie.

But our watchers know this is the language of the stars, and I doubt anyone will tell time any differently.

An hour is still an hour, as far as we can see.