Why do I feel so badly that she's gone?

Four weeks ago, while I took my morning shower, a small insurgent -- eight legs gangly and no web -- crept up the side of the shower toward the corner, where four others had already staked out their cobby estates. When the insurgent tripped a wire, the largest of the incumbent bunch lunged, front legs flailing, and knocked the party crasher to the soap dish suctioned six inches above my head, gone from my view.

A rinse of Pert later, her gangly front legs appeared over the edge of the dish -- the edge that hung out over the shower, not that nearest the wall. She rose up, over, and fell.

Spinner-quick, she dangled just outside of the shower spray -- and four inches from my nose. I told her what I tell them all: "You're welcome to shack up your own space in here, but enter mine and you're drain gravy."

She clambered up her moistened thread, scrabbled over the soap, and made her way up the wall. Just before she reached the web that gave her approach away, she turned and made for the territories, the far corner where no other spider lay.

Five minutes ago, I took a piss. On the way by the shower, I glanced up, and noticed she wasn't there. It was not hard to notice -- over the last month, she had molted four times, and the skins of her maturity still hung about my shower like spectral warnings to All Ye Who Enter. (I'm not sure how she ate, or grew; I never saw prey in my shower...and I'm not sure if that fact is the chicken, or the egg.)

The corner where she'd hung for a month was bare. I looked all over the shower stall, above and behind the toilet, beneath it...then caught my face in the bathroom mirror.

I looked distraught. I was trying to find a spider that had taken up space in my shower, then spent a month GROWING and wigging me out...and I looked like I'd lost something precious.

Maybe it's the reminder of what's coming Monday; maybe it's just that I'm tired and sad today. Either way, that stranger spider, without a molecule of thought or intent, made me feel remorse; made me feel loss; and made me realize -- in a frantic search for the perpetuation of her short existence (that I am sure every reader is considering silly) -- that there is an arc of birth and life that is define by struggle, with a perhaps inevitable end; but with each conscious moment of survival, every living thing creates a resonance, a widening ripple, that extends throughout the universe around it.

My birthday makes me realize death. But a spider made me realize, really, I just want to ripple.

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