We Are the Ants

The farther we are from someone, the further we live in their past

“Obviously, you changed your mind.”

“No,” Zooey said, locking her eyes onto mine. “Charlie changed it. He told me our life wouldn’t be easy, that we’d struggle to pay our bills and put food on the table, that we’d argue and fight, and that there was a good chance we’d end up hating each other.”

I rolled my eyes. “How could you resist a pitch like that?”

Zooey smiled. “But he also told me that no matter what happened, we would love our baby like no parents had ever loved a baby in the history of the world. He said he would sell every last thing he owned to give our child the life it deserved.” She stopped speaking for a moment, but I could tell by the way she bit her lip that she wasn’t done. “Even though I agreed to have the baby, I still wasn’t sure until Charlie took the job with my father.”

Maybe love doesn’t require falling after all. Maybe it only requires that you choose to be in it.

That the minutes and hours between our birth and death are more than frantic moments of chaos. Because if that’s all they are—if there are no rules governing our lives—then our entire existence is a meaningless farce.

A person who believed in patterns might be tempted to believe Diego and I were fated to meet.
Only, it wasn’t fate. It wasn’t destiny. And it certainly wasn’t God. It was chance. A random series of events given meaning by someone desperate to prove there’s a design to our lives.

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.

And one day you’ll wake up, look around, and wonder how you could ever have believed otherwise.

But you can’t live in the past; you can only visit. I wasn’t sure what was happening between us, but I didn’t want it to happen without me.

“If a kid looks like he doesn’t give a shit, it’s not because he doesn’t believe in himself anymore; it’s because no one else believes in him.”
I thought about Jesse. I wondered if that’s why he killed himself. If he thought no one believed in him and that his only escape was at the end of a noose. I wondered about Marcus, too. People believed in him, but the person they believed in was a lie. I don’t know when Marcus stopped being himself and started pretending to be the person others expected him to be.