We Are the Ants

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

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.

“You like bacon, right?” Audrey asked.
“Duh.”
“So, when you’re offered bacon for breakfast, do you refuse because you’re worried about what’s going to happen when it’s gone?”
“No.”
“No!” Audrey smacked me in the chest. “You eat that bacon and you love it because it’s delicious. You don’t fret over whether you’ll ever have bacon again. You just eat the bacon.” Audrey stood in front of me and held my face between her hands. Her expression was so solemn that it was difficult not to laugh. “Eat the bacon, Henry.”

Maybe our lives did have meaning. Nana’s did. It meant something to her and to the people in her photographs. Each and every one of those memories was a moment that had mattered, even the ones that hadn’t seemed important at the time.