Flying with one good wing.

What's more annoying than a gnat? A gnat with only one good wing. The little critter was limping on my desk, pouncing across the list of teachers, their corresponding offices and phone numbers not five minutes before. Everytime it would attempt to fly it would do a loop and end up right back where it was. It's little gnat-y body would circle around in a seemingly confused sense and try it again only to find that for all its frantic trouble it, again, ended up in a painfully similar place to where it started. It walked around flipping and flopping desperately until it flew off the ledge. The first time it did this it found the desk again but the second time it was hopelessly in mid-air. It performed a jumble of loop-d-loops and frantic twirling like an airplane with one engine cut who is desperately trying to compensate by flying it circles. Perhaps more like a one man boat with one oar, which he keeps paddling on only one side.

The gnat, in mid-tailspine, spiralled around my head (as only gnats, injured or not, can do) before it disappeared from my periphery all together. For all I know it could be on top of my head right now or dying in the dust-ridden carpet below.

I suppose if I were a more predictable writer I'd analogy the flight of the limping gnat with our own futile journey through life. I'd pick out specific instances in my life in where I found myself twisting and turning in mid-air just to land back in the same place I started. But really, honestly, and truly my inspection of a gnat was just that. It was nothing more than a creature who seemed to be having a fit about a broken wing and who thought it's only purpose in this life was to fly, whether it be in frantic circles or straight lines.

Sometimes a gnat is just a gnat.

currently: extrospective

current piece of writing:
"Not only don't I know who I am, but I'm very suspicious of people who do know who they are. I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five people an hour."--Tom Baker, actor best known for Doctor Who (4th doctor)