Encounter with a bug

As I sat on the park bench, watching the frisbee golfers playing through, I became aware that I wasn’t alone.

He was on the other end of the wooden slats, just a tiny little beetle of some kind. He paused in his journey across the bench surface while we each examined the other.

It was amusing to me. My imagination provided the thoughts he must be thinking, his little buggy dreams and aspirations. After a few moments, he turned and silently departed over bench’s end.

Just in time. A hungry sparrow arrived, only seconds after he left. In my heart, I cheered at his brave and narrow escape from the cruel fate Nature had determined.

What must that sort of life be like for my little friend? Any moment and the flutter of a bird’s wings or the shadow of a careless boot, and its life would vanish. Indomitable and undeterred, my beetle acquaintance just soldiered on, as each of us must, crawling through his life’s finite moments one by one.

I never saw the plane that screamed out of the sky and made a red splotch of me.

My spirit observed, with my final parting thought, “Ain’t metaphor a bitch?”

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