During the endless battle of mosquitoes barraging you in the spring after a wet winter, I swat. Swatting away each little bite they take, drawing some blood with each attack. They are everywhere. Hiding under the table, in the hoodie, when you round a random corner, they are there. They get a little bit of extra attention as I try swatting away their annoyance, yet I make no progress. They are still there throughout the spring, into summer, the fall, even through the cold of the winter. Then, what do you know, they return in swarms whether the winter was wet or dry.
As humans, we have done our best to destroy these little bugs. We have resorted to dropping poison from planes, spraying the side of the roads with pesticides to kill their eggs, and pollute our water to try to kill these mosquitoes. So, we kill ourselves to destroy the annoyance of something smaller than the tip of my finger.
I hear us complain from inside of our wooden caves, cooled to the temperatures that keep our bodies from sweating. To avoid a little bug bite, we hide inside of our homes where we have ample food and enough space to forget we are stuck indoors, growing weaker. Our bodies degrade as we hide from the mosquito. Luckily we have stocked the house full of food, there is a way to get rid of our feces, and water endlessly flows from a metal tube. Once night comes, we have captured daylight in glass that turns on and off by the switch of a button but make sure to keep the door closed because those bugs are attracted to the glow. If you get bored, we have created a way of tuning out of the world around us by engaging with a screen that has never-ending artwork in the palm of our hands.
If we are lucky enough to have another life inside our cave, we probably do not even know they exist three-quarters of the time. Only during feeding times, breaks in the scrolling, and when mustering up the courage to brave the mosquito attacks do we acknowledge that another life is present. We could learn to learn the benefits of this little David’s, but why would Goliath endure discomfort?
A note from the author:
Please understand this piece is supposed to be an exaggerated metaphor on human’s relationship with the constant struggle of living. The mosquito, a tiny little pest that all-to-often ruins my day, represents all of the little struggles we run into throughout our daily life. The ludicrous examples of “attempting” to fix the problem are how I feel we try to handle the continual onslaught, oftentimes overworking ourselves just to solve something we could ignore or prevent with an extra layer of clothing. The third paragraph is a metaphor for hiding our problems inside of ourselves instead of addressing them with a conversation that would be uncomfortable. Often I would say the lack of vocabulary, structure, and timing around communicating feelings is the beginning of the discomfort.
Maybe, if our government would allow the education system to teach soft-skills there would less suffering on this planet? That is just my opinion.
In the end, I hope this piece makes you a bit uncomfortable, makes you laugh at yourself, and then gives you the freedom to have a difficult conversation, do something you feared doing, or simply allow you to go for a walk with the mosquitos.