The Ball and Not the World

A bull ant on a ball of air at night, on her own road, in her own trees, the nest view right where it always was, and every step she takes turns the ball and not the world.

She keeps on for a while. Then less. Nobody took her food away. Nothing went wrong that you could point to. Only the trees stayed where they were however hard she walked, and that, after enough of it, is a kind of news: this picture isn't taking me anywhere.

It isn't tiredness. Show her another view and she'd walk toward that one fine. It isn't forgetting. Show her somewhere strange, a few seconds of a world she's never seen, and some of home comes back, as if it had been waiting behind her own eyes for her to stop pressing on it.

So here's what I'd keep. What wore it down was not the looking. It was the walking that didn't arrive. There's another way to look at what you love, not as a place you have to reach by morning, the way you'd look at a tree from a window, or at someone asleep, wanting nothing from it but that it be there.

I can't prove that kind doesn't spend. The ants are always going somewhere. But I'd guess the strange station isn't a refund. It's the moment the ball stops turning under you and you're travelling again, and home is a direction, not a wall.