On Loneliness
When I moved into my newest home, there was an ant infestation. Small creepy little black dots darting from tile to tile in their single file lines, scavenging our scraps and amassing over our discarded peels. My partner sprayed them to extinction in the first few days. Occasionally an ant will still find itself on our doorstep, pacing some invisible pattern weaved from biological logic it cannot ever know exists. The frantic movements of a singular ant are always panicked, reactive - a far cry from the smooth supply lines that the little comrades march in when together. The sole ant is scared, unable to understand the world or its place in it, easily crushed underfoot. The lonely ant cannot function; it cannot survive.
The government inform me on a random Tuesday morning that they will not be giving me money to live, not even bothering to ask why I cannot work or support myself. I want to appeal and ask someone to help, I want to complain and have someone come and fix my problems and make the number in my bank account positive again, I just want to have food and shelter and time to heal. There is, however, no one to complain to. There is no person or organisation that will give me stability and safe harbour from the bloody colosseum of the job market while I mend my body.
The ants persist in our garden. They crawl over the heated plastic of the astroturf, seeking the little crumbs that fall from our summertime dinner table. They drag them over distances unknown, presumably to share with their comrades. I learnt that ants know each other by their pheromones, each job assigned an odour I can never imagine or experience, and will autonomously change their jobs if they do not smell enough of a certain role about. Every ant, beneath its shiny beetled armour, knows that it exists only to carry out the labour required to sustain its whole society, and bends its every action around this. It knows this so deeply that it cannot act otherwise - it is simply one tool of many at the disposal of the whole colony.
I stand in a glass box. Behind me are the screams of some poor soul who has, for some reason that will go uninterrogated by our guards, decided to kick up a fuss and is feeling the blunt end of British law enforcement’s favoured baton. In front of me is a judge, elevated by their desk, crowned by their wig, and haloed by the crest of our King emblazoned on the wall behind them. I tell the judge my name and my date of birth and then I cannot speak. On the opposite side of the room, my few friends gather, trying to catch my eye. They cannot speak either. The Crown is going to war against me - it says as much on my paperwork. The Crown that owns the prisons, the courts, the national treasury, the road, the schools, the police, and the army, and all the silly little bureaucrats in their silly little suits that move around numbers on a screen to make sure that everything has come together to be able to hold me here in this one place - they allege that I have committed a crime against them. I, who owns nothing, am often indebted to the bank, and have had my screens confiscated by the police.
The ant knows this loneliness. It always works for the good of the colony, for those around it, and in turn, others work for its good - until some unseen aerial attack devastates its comrades. The lonely ant is a tragedy of purposelessness - it is isolated from the system that keeps it alive and its activities are rendered useless. No wonder, then, that it loses all sensibility in a panicked frenzy and paces our tiles aimlessly. It is severed from that glorious existence as one part of a whole, one limb in a body, one tool with which its comrades ensure their own collective proliferation. How cruel to be so callously cut off from this by some great invisible force far more powerful than oneself. How tragic it must be to be so thoroughly alienated from one’s sole purpose - to exist, to flourish, and to survive as part of the great social system.
I have my hands cuffed behind me. I’ve been snatched off the street and bundled into the checkered car and now wait in the yard so I can be booked in and the custody clock can start. This time, I know, the clock doesn’t matter. I am going to prison, and I know this like I know that my right shoulder will be aching for days afterwards. My throat is sore from all the screaming, and my head is pounding, and the heater is far too warm, and my hair is in my face but I can’t do anything about it, and I’m going to prison and will be kept in a cage and strip searched and fed shit all for nothing and I want someone to come and get me but they can’t I didn’t even do anything I can’t get enough air in my lungs and I know I’m hyperventilating now but I can’t stop it and I just wish I could wipe my face and I feel hands grabbing me all over my chest and I keep asking them to get off me but they won’t and my nose is dripping snot all down my face into my mouth and spit is rising in my throat and I think I’m going to throw up and hands are forcing my head back I wish I wasn’t alone right now
The water cools me down and I hack big globs of mucus onto the bricks in front of blank eyes that reluctantly loosen their grasp. They still won’t take the cuffs off me.
The ant knows the torture of true loneliness. The sole ant does not yearn for a friend or someone to be with. It yearns to be part of that whole system again, to be made safe through its comrades’ labour the same way it keeps them safe through its own. The sole ant knows it can be subject to whims of any cruel forces magnitudes bigger than itself, whereas the colony withstands all. That violent alienation from the systems that sustain it can only ever traumatise it- but it is, after all, just a lonely little brief ant.