Microcosm

It's funny how, when you spend enough time in something, it becomes a microcosm for your entire life. I've had plenty of time to wonder why this is, of course. Is it because of your personality? Do things always come out like they have through your entire life because you make them that way? Or is it just that any situation is interpreted in light of your past, so that the situation isn't really like your past, it's just that you think of it that way?

Questions, questions. So many questions, and so much time to think about them.

For the first month, I leaned heavily on the idea that a person's personality shapes the events, and so everything becomes a microcosm because of the way you shape things. Yes, the first month I was driven to self-loathing, believing the problem was with me--that I caused it all. But now I believe that it's the latter--that any situation is interpreted in light of the past. For I've seen things now that I didn't come close to seeing before.

It takes ten steps to get from one side of the jar to the other. Ten steps to cross the space smaller than the palm of my delicate hands as a human.

And yet the walls of the jar are oddly comforting, and safe. Nothing can possibly hurt you in here, secluded behind the strong walls. As a beetle, I always have to be careful of predators, a swooping bird ready to grab me up for breakfast. I once narrowly escaped with my life when a Robin came, looking to feed its young, its beak streaking down, piercing the ground centimetres from me as I scurried beneath a rock for cover.

And Hermione takes good care of me; she even researched what type of beetle I am--Phalacrognathus muelleri--and what we generally eat as a species.

Dung and other filthy waste, of course. But it tastes good to me, in this body. Story of my life. Because of my personality, or because of interpretation? There's the question.

You know, I wasn't drawn to insects for the reason everyone thinks. When people think of a beetle, they think of sneaky, filthy monsters invading your home, carrying disease and ruining food, spoiling supper, craftily hiding beneath floorboards and in the walls, where no one can see them until they steal your food, carrying it away, like a thief. It's the way people think of me.

But, no, that wasn't it at all.

I was drawn to insects for their industry--the way they are constantly working, pulling, pushing, scavenging. Even feeding is a task, working swiftly to move onto the next job that needs doing.

All those so-called "proud" animals, like lions, cannot compare. Proud. More like slothful the way they lazily doze all day, only waking for food (which the females hunt for the males, who are too lazy to go about doing anything else). Pride in some inherent power that they had never done anything to attain, only lay around relying on their natural attributes.

No, the beetle works, always ignored by the greater powers, looked down upon, stepped on--literally--and laughed at in comedies when the woman starts screaming, disgusted, begging for the man to come in and thrust the heel of his foot down upon its body, squishing out its insides so that yellowish-green puss is spread over the floor, revolting, once again, the woman.

Did you know I went to a muggle University to learn journalism? I fancied myself as the great exposer of wizarding society, able to probe deep and ask the great questions. I always knew that I wasn't the smartest person at answering them, but that didn't matter, because the questions weren't even being asked. If I could wake wizarding society out of its stupor, make them ponder the big questions that had just lain dormant for thousands of years, accepted because that's the way things have always been done and God forbid anyone should ever be smarter than their ancestors (because, you know, every generation just gets stupider despite greater nutrition, greater education and higher intelligence scores).

When I graduated, over eighty percent in every class, I was accepted as an editorialist for the Daily Prophet--the first in the paper's history, of course.

My head swelled with importance, my ego filling up like a balloon, taking up all possible space in me, squeezing out all but my preconceived notions. Then, like a balloon, it grew too big and burst, sending little pieces of rubber everywhere.

No one cared. No one wanted to ask the big questions of why, and where we are going. They wanted to hear about the latest fashion, the latest sad story (human-interest, like the gossip column of a school newspaper), or the latest report on the goings-on of the purebloods.

My editorials, all agonizingly crafted and slaved over, were regulated to the back page, as filler for whatever issue of the week lacked page-space. Until they decided that a picture would garner more sales, and so I was locked into another glass jar. They had a position as a columnist, they said--another weekly episode on the rich and famous, everyone else's life too boring or too empty to contemplate, and so the vicarious people need something else on which to feed.

Like all prisons, it was horrible at first (ten steps from one end of the jar to the other, smaller than the palm of my dainty hand), but I grew accustomed to it, and began to enjoy the security of it (there are always predators willing to get you when you're looking for the truth. The enemies of truth are everywhere, wanting to be safe in their cocoons of impossible beliefs and false opinions that they treat as facts, and so they lash out at anyone who shows them otherwise).

Even the food I was fed became tasty to my body, disgusting and repulsive as it was, until I began to revel in my job, prying all the little delicious morsels of dung and filth from the person's life and excreting it onto the page (Hermione broke poor Harry's heart, you know).

I'm afraid of being let go, now, when the summer is over and Hermione has promised to release me. Outside of the jar, I won't have the security the glass offers me, or the thrice-daily feedings Hermione so graciously gives.

But I guess I'm not too scared. I have another jar to fall back on. It looks bigger, but, really, it's just the same.