Every night you surprise me in a corner, tangled in dust bunnies, picking them up, bigger than you seem at first glance, and even blacker, as if discovering you would bring a magnifying glass that makes you monstrous and lethal.
The first reaction is fear, especially if the light of a lamp falls on you diagonally and projects your gigantic shadow on the wall, with those pointed legs that bend like articulated blades, as if you walked out of Fritz Lang’s expressionist films or beside Dreyer’s Vampyr.
But, as soon as you identify yourself as the docile, sluggish, incredibly slow warehouse beetle, that initial alert dissolves into pity. It makes one want to help you walk, to remove the obstacles, starting with that sphere of dog fur, dust, and fragments of paper in which you have wrapped yourself, an obsessed reader of detritus.
You have picked them up, I know, to feed on those minute particles that the rest of creatures despise; and you stumble in what you consider your nourishment, sometimes intent on running into the same strip of baseboard again and again.
You do not fear the wolf spider that nests in the corner nor the scorpion that sometimes slips through the cracks in the firewood, dragged along by those of us who inhabit the house, as the sentinels of Troy did. You rest peacefully in your exoskeleton, hard and impenetrable as anthracite, which defends you from the sharp jaws, in that ambush war that happens every night in the life of insects.
You have preferred that your elytra, wings soldered to your shell, reinforce your ground defense rather than exploring the dimensions of the air.
You practice a swaying calm, as if you were walking on wires; you trust yourself with the composure that steel shows before a hurricane of grass. You let yourself be taken between my fingers and when I return you to the ground you continue with your business, as if nothing had happened.
You do not even pretend to flee. You do not possess the security of the gods but rather that of those indifferent to their own goings-on. At the worst, you raise your abdomen and eject a reddish substance that smells worse than a worn-out shoe salvaged from the dampest of basements.
You have built yourself from all those scraps you recycle under the furniture, like a blind alchemist, bent on a dark and solitary destiny in the midst of the cosmos, while the rest of creatures indulge in amusement and bustle.
But in the end I find you in company. The female below, larger in size; the male firmly perched. You are a double shell adrift: a double shell so stubborn that you mate in full sun, on the ground, away from your corners; with no sense of time or space, for you, a duplicated creature, advance by stumbling and ecstasy, so glued to one another that neither life nor death can matter to you.
Only that being together: that passion for the original unity: two fragile and furious beings, slow and urgent, that have escaped from their fragments and fused like a puzzle to which the lost pieces had driven one to despair.
Three beings, better said. My elytra are also welded to my back.