17/09/23 - I killed a spider today.

It was smaller than the tip of a pen and I crushed it thinking I could move it out of my way. It died in my hands, at my hands, so small that it could have been a speck of dust. I wondered if God had ever felt the way I did in that moment, having ruined creation itself in in!nite gentleness. Is that what we are? 
I killed a spider before it had a chance to die, and then I pieced together some blind, clumsy, helpless thoughts about innocence and martyrdom and whether spiders could understand death in a way we didn’t. If they can imagine something else after the stomp, the broom, the looming viciousness of the world—if it was better or worse that the spider met me instead of the end of time. “e spider was too small to be laid to rest, of course, as so many innocent things are. 
“This spider, it was so small, it looked death in the eye. Death looked like me.