The Small Things

By Dylan Kull 

To the ant, the crumbs fall from the cake like boulders, crashing onto the tin tray, creating reverberations that cause all six of its legs to quake. The amoeba watches as the tide erodes the reef. To them, it looks like the integrity of the universe is collapsing. Particle mountains of ocean rock float all around them. The germs on your hands watch the earth beneath them split and magma seep onto the surface.

You just got a paper cut.

All of this to say, there is calamity everywhere if you look close enough. If you pay just enough attention you might see the destruction of things as they happen right beneath your nose. But you won't. The human eye doesn’t see such things. Things like the imperceptible fractures in the intangible fibers of love. They don’t make microscopes that can see all the ways hearts are broken and brains are destroyed one cell at a time. Not the slivers of our psyches that our families have sliced away over the span of a childhood. Single words tear holes in relationships and small grievances become insurmountable rifts. Everyday a piece of you is destroyed. Maybe if you were just small enough you could have seen it and stopped it from happening, but then again, if you were that small you couldn’t do anything at all. To that end, maybe our size is merciful. Maybe we are better off being too big to watch the world crumble around us like cake at every second. For destruction is inevitable on scales big and small. And we have enough big problems to deal with, we’re fortunate we can ignore the small things… until we can’t.