The encounters in one’s own kitchen, that ended up, enlightening, translated…
Suddenly, a gecko appeared from out of nowhere on my walls, don’t know when it came into the house.
The huge gecko looked chubby, and would call out every now and then, and that reminded of the insect calls I’d heard as a young child. Several days, I’d heard the timid calls again, and, there was a smaller gecko, following behind the larger one on the walls.
One day, as I was sorting through something on the kitchen counters, I watched the gecko, stealthily, get close to a small roach, then, stuck out its tongue, then, swallowed the roach whole, then, I’d heard it, crunched down the vermin afterwards. He’d told me with excitement, that it was, exactly like how Animal Planet had portrayed it, the lizards, eating the tiny insects.
Sometimes, the smaller gecko ran wild and free on the walls alone, then, suddenly, halted, lifted up its head, looked around, then, ran away, shyly again. It’s thin limbs and torso were, quite energetic, like a young boy who’d, hopped around afterschool. That tiny gecko, stuck itself on the fuzzy glass, the toes became like tiny flowers that moved around, added more life, more fun, very cute, and, it’d made this retired aging man, loved it so, and he’d, started, observing it closely. This gave me something new, the baby gecko had this magical power. And yet, it’d not known that it had this power, and, several days, it went into hiding somewhere.
At the time, we’d been, tried by the roaches that kept surfacing up at the corners of the walls.
As someone called aloud: ROACH!
Then suddenly, the sound of footsteps the roach knew, that it was, sighted, scattered panickily away, but clearly, it’d, alarmed everybody all around, and, used its, long antenna, to test out which way is the safest escape, became hesitant of where it should duck and hide. On our fronts, we’d gone all out, picked up the cleaning agents, broom and slippers, bent our backs, got down on all fours, to try and find it. Using this sort of an extreme measure, to deal with that roach that’s, about, two-centimeters in size. Seeing it moved quickly, in a panic, in survival mode, being a killer as I, in the sudden moment as I was about to go down hard, and WHACK! It’d, touched me.
I’d recalled how the nearby marketplace would spray the pesticides regularly, and the following day the smell is still intact, and there were, the sides of the pathways, paved with the brown dead, bodies. The roaches that died, with belly up, the legs, curled toward the bodies, like in a struggle, before they’d, met their own, ends. And, there were the one, or two that were still, twitching, barely, alive, like calling out for help, or they were, expressing something.
The roaches that won’t get killed off, became, a vicious insult a long time ago. But again, who had the roaches hurt? Ordinarily, as we see it, we’d, start, using the pesticides, to eradicate the population of, we must, kill them all, off.
Where did the hatred toward roaches in us come from?
As some see them, they’d start screaming and jump up and down; while others, subconsciously, killed on sight; for me, I’d hated how they’d, hidden in the volumes of my books, and lay its eggs, and, defecated on the side of my books, leaving behind those, stains.
Roaches has that strange bad smell, and the bacteria, you’d see it crawled across the bathrooms, the trash bins, the kitchen counter, and just about, all the corners of your house, and by instincts, we’d, hated them. And in the cities, even though there are the screen doors set to close tight, the fruits left out on the tables still attracted the flies, don’t know from how far they’d, smelled the scent, and come on over; the roaches, we can’t prevent them, they’d intruded from the vents, or the drains. The roaches that can’t be killed off completely, we’d used countless, frugal measures, to destroy them in our homes, and yet, as they’d found the crumbs of foods, they will, multiply, only increased their populations, and not, dying or getting, eradicated.
From before the households left their doors open, the cats and dogs came and went freely, the fowls pecked around casually. In these, “houses not locked up tight enough”, there would be the ants, spiders, geckos, flies, mosquitoes, and from time to time, the bees, the wasps too, they had the wings, and the stings too. And the spider web by the corner of the roof will only get swept down around new year’s, and there were, the countless insects, invisible, to our, naked, eyes. And surely, the roaches crawled, all over the countryside, and they’re, all too, fat, but they don’t come in by the large numbers. The insect world that’s natural to the land, followed the means of biology, and, kept itself, balanced out.
In the lands, people already learned to adapt themselves to those leaping crawling, flying insects, and they’d naturally carried a different attitude toward them. Knowing that they’re, everywhere, knowing how they’re, able to, live on their own, and die on their own too, that you don’t need to, go that extra mile, to exterminate them. While under the same roofs, at most, we’d, swat them out of our, sights, and we’d, gotten along, fine, nobody would worry about their, existence, as we’re all, way too busy. The windowsills of that old house, there were the tracks of the millipedes, and a few piles of gecko droppings, as natural as gazing up in the night skies to see the stars and the moon.
ants, roaches…
The roaches are in a wide varieties of species, lived on the earth for billions of years, and thus, their existences must be, meaningful in their own, ways. To this day, although, people hated roaches, but if we accept the “butterfly effect”, or how the gecko can awaken the uncle’s inner child, the stars and the moons, inspired so many creations of artwork, songs, or poetry, the inspirations in the great literary works, allow me to quote Jean Valjean in Les Miserable by Hugo, “everything is functional as a whole. We can apply algebra to the clouds, the sunlight benefits the roses, which theorists can state, that the scent from the flowers is pointless to the stars. ………………anything from the sunlight to the bugs, no one has a right to look down on anyone else, we are all, in need of, one another.”
And so, this is how this individual, learned to, coexist in peace, more or less, with a known vermin, and, surely, the roaches are, awful, disease-carrying agents, and disgusting, crawling all over the foods we’d left out on the supper tables overnight, but, they’d been around, longer than humans, and, they hadn’t, changed that much in their, forms, so, they must serve a purpose, it’s just, that we humans, too easily, categorize things the way we do, and we’d, lost that tolerance for everything around us.
Life, the Obstacle Course 