Jan 05 2009
the Emotional Ecology
When I was a kid, I read nature magazines, cover to cover, stenciling the wilds of the Amazons and the Sierras. In this one issue, I remembered the factoid: scorpions survive, on average, over 120 years because they take such small and short and gaspy breaths.
So of course, me, still terrified of death and dreaming of forever, I attempted the scorpion way. After about 45 minutes, I started to hyperventilate and caved on my bedroom floor, breathing deep and violently, horrified at what I could not achieve.
“I am going to die,” I thought.
I am somewhat more composed now but, if life is a measure of the breaths we take, or whatever that saying says, “the moments that take your breath away,” bullshit like that…
I SHOULD LIVE FOREVER.
In the Scorpion-philosophy, I have gasped so many times that I must be some product of longevity. For how many times you have made me gasp, in excitement, in happiness, in ecstasy, in sadness, in pain, in complete and utter loneliness, my gasps measure all those endeavors.
It has led me all to this, and so little more:
1. Gasping is the prologue to the major meltdown.
2. And my life has gasped through for what feels like an eternity.
3. Or the eternity that pales in the shadow of yours and mine and love.
But, I suppose my life has only been about a sixth of what the scorpion endures. So shouldn’t the scorpion be so jealous of me? Why was I so hard on myself at 7-years old? Horrified that I had failed the living? The scorpion will have pain for so much longer than I could ever possibly want.
I will rot in the dirt while he scales the ground, skittering and skirting in life’s worst.
No.
I don’t really know why this hit me today but here it goes: NO. I really am envious. Rather, I do think it is all so hard.
A scorpion doesn’t have the emotional pain that comes so naturally to humans, it doesn’t have the stress, and the anguish, the happiness and greatness that hopefully comes before that.
Being a human is so hard.
The scorpion doesn’t wait for you to call, sitting on a bathroom floor, crying and overanalyzing, shrieking and dying and wondering if for years the tattoo of your name will ever leave brain and tongue and champagne bottles on the bottom shelf.
In conclusion, inconclusively, I should be thankful for my species, and grateful to be a part, but suddenly the lows have outweighed the highs, and oh god, how I would love to be a scorpion.
And to have never known you.
Just to be one happy poisonous insect on the eternal horizon of everything and nothing.
