Silverfish Graveyard

As I was cleaning a corner of my room, I came across two dead silverfish on a cardboard box and did not fail to say “Yucksss” before wiping them off with a piece of toilet paper. After which, I took a closer look at the cardboard box, and discovered more dead silverfish.

It looked like a normal cardboard box. It used to contain industrial tape. I know because I got the box home from some company I used to work at. However, it must not be a normal cardboard box which I thought of it to be for there are so many dead silverfish on it. I could not bear to count the number of carcasses exactly, but 34 seems like a conservative exaggeration for you to share my disgust. I disposed of the bodies with care and repulsion and more toilet paper. It must be a special silverfish graveyard cardboard box. Befittingly, I threw it away, as well.

“Why are there so many dead silverfish in this corner of my room?” I asked myself. I did not know the answer immediately so I set out to investigate the matter.

Firstly, I took a book near the silverfish graveyard and tapped it against the ground to see if any more dead silverfish will fall out, or worse, alive ones. Luckily, there were not any. Therefore, I must force myself to conclude, for lack of better alternative, that all the silverfish in my room are dead and those alive are gone. They are dead and gone.

Secondly, I must ask myself how the silverfish died and went. With a gentle twitch of my imagination, I know that there can only be two possibilities, either they have evolved teleportation skills and abandoned their grandparents to die of old age; or they were all poisoned by a psychotic book loving silverfish, who thought that as long as the silverfish survive, they will eat and even though they can find alternatives now, one day, the alternatives will run out and they will have to eat books. After poisoning all the silverfish, it slammed its head repeatedly onto the cupboard box and died.

Thirdly, I researched on the internet to find that silverfish have existed for approximately thirty million years. Do you know how long thirty million years is? It is longer than I can imagine, and therefore, quite damn bloody long. And if the silverfish existed for so damn bloody long, and still look as creepy as they do, and still eat that shit (hair, dandruff, glue) that they do, I think teleportation skills should be quite low on the priority list. I deduce that the teleportation theory is unlikely. Therefore, I must incline towards the psycho silverfish theory, and mourn for two minutes for its tragic and bizarre death.

Then again, it was quite opinionated and presumptuous to poison everybody. It was cruel and incomprehensible. Could it have valued books something supposedly inanimate and tangible over life?

Isn’t life the most precious of all? Being alive, and staying alive. It is life that is of the highest order of living. Life and being alive are the crystallized sense of what living is. It is about being alive that we have a use for books: I use them to place on the shelves; the silverfish use them for food;and, the shelves use them for company. Of all the three examples, the most esteemed use for a book would be how the silverfish use them for food to sustain life itself. Sustaining life is the most fundamental, and therefore, the highest form of living. Now, we suddenly have the psycho silverfish who killed everyone else who might end up eating books... Was it for love?

There is no dilemma here. This is only irony. This is the stuff of war and protests (like for animal rights and human rights). This is the stuff of songs. This is the stuff of books.

I could kill myself to feed someone who is starving, but that would be disrespectful to my own life. So, I proclaim that I would gladly be killed by someone who is starving for food. Oh! I am so inspired that I would turn vegetarian if not for the fact that I can quickly agree that vegetables have lives too, so it won’t really make any difference, and enjoying eating good food is enjoying the highest form of living well, and that, makes me feel good about myself, that I am better than an psychotic book loving silverfish.

(sneak.)