Stars and Ants

I gaze at the star studded night and wonder if I belong in there.

Am I the darkness hovering upon the universe! Or am I the star that shoots into the sky racing through the dark, lightening its way into the never ending void! 

What am I, that looks for purpose in this vast nothingness. Am I that grain of sand withering with time or am I the atom that fuels the sun with it’s dying breath?

I feel like an ant that has lost its scent trail, yet is still roaming near it's hill. I wonder if I’m running around lopsided pulling myself to the center of my start, like a collapsing star would to it’s center. My thoughts stuck deep into the brain with the brute force of a black hole never reaching my hands and mouth.

I blink and they wink back. 

A star always tries to reach out to the nearby planets and its surrounding family. It communicates with it’s photons beaming upon them. The near and dear suffer the heat as life starts seeping out of them and the distant are always cold. That’s what remains at the end of the day as a result of reaching out. You keep none happy.

And when a star gets exhausted, literally running on fumes, the family loses sleep. There’s no more day and night. If by any chance, due to the mass of the certain star reaches a limit, it becomes a black hole sucking in them. Even love cannot escape the force of a dead star. It withers with time and has no meaning at all. What good of a helping hand when there’s no one to take it, to be exact if there’s no hand to get that help.

There’s no real difference in the life of a star and an ant. Their importance in this universe might differ. But their lives are all the same. Both get trampled on by a random event.

On a minuscule scale, ants get trampled by human kids playing or an unassuming shoe. On a grandeur scale, a star gets trampled upon by the forces of the universe or to be exact, forces of microscopic electrons and protons. Did I just prove that the death of an ant has sufficient honor compared to a star that dies by the hand of a microscopic particle.

They say, one can communicate their ardent wish with the help of stars. They say stars communicate thoughts and ideas from a person to person who stare at stars and ponder over their lives and place in the universe.

A few hours back in the evening, I wished for a certain ant to fulfill its purpose of reaching it’s hill with a grain of rice too heavy for its mandibles. 

Tracing it’s pheromones, it scrammed towards it’s hill like an astronaut on his space walk. A shower of pebble sized meteorites threw it across the ground. It shuffled, whisking at the grain, it resumed crawling towards its destiny, focused on its purpose. Its pace increased as the chaos around threatened to halt it in its path. Destiny threw in a few human feet, water splashes, a broken twig, blades of grass, a concrete runway and a spider in the mix to spice up the flashiest sequence in the life of an ant. 

It looked flashy from an external perception, a higher ground. The poignancy of the scene and bravery of that lone ant is nothing short of a survival course for someone who needs an apparatus to breath. This moment is insignificant for other ants and beings, even the very ant has no time to ponder over its adventure.

It's just another moment in an exhausting day for it. It’s not just a moment, it's the moment for someone who cannot scream with excitement at the astounding fight for survival. 

It’d have reached its destination in a moment or two, if a sprinkler hadn’t washed away the path back home. It recovered though and searched for the grain and held onto it like an astronaut who lost his connection to his spaceship and floating in the void. Instincts kicked in, alarmed at the loss of trail, it padded trying to swim back to the place where it had lost its connection. What’s the strength of an ant in the face of ebbs of a water stream going downhill! Home is nowhere to be seen or felt. It floated helplessly as the void of no trail started choking it. It’ll lose consciousness in a few minutes, paralyzed due to less oxygen and the shock might send it to coma. 

All I could do is observe. What can I do! I’m just an observer. I cannot intervene.

If only I could reach the wandering ant. I’d let it know it’s ordeal is for nothing. It’s purpose and it’s hard work to overwrite it’s destiny is nothing but a joke to the destiny. Let it know that it’s futile to stay afloat. Let the flow of space and time decide its direction rather than trying to stand against the ebbs of time and destiny only to die or worse, suffer the fate of a Quadriplegic. Of course, every being and thing in the universe is a quadriplegic in the hands of fate.

Ready to resume communications for the day, stardust flew towards earth and started settling in the atmosphere. 

The stars I’m looking at right now might have gone out of existence. Universe has a way of telling the existence even after its demise. Right now, I might be looking at the moments bygone. An ever expanding universe, stars with stories to tell, a destiny crippling and handing out our pre-written plays in destiny’s act of life which we cannot control. 

Don’t we have universes of our own! Why don’t we?

Then it stuck. I’ve traveled with no legs, held with no hands, felt sensations with a dead skin and neurons beneath. Fought demons with no swords or a magic staff.

An idiot I’m, to not recognize the ever expanding universe in my brain. I might not govern the universe out there, but I’m responsible for my universe.

And so I wished silently at the winking stars, to send my message to the lost; to stay in control of their very own universe.