Hashtag Spider

Who is observing?” I questioned in my beginners meditation workshop. Whatever it is, it does not speak. It observes. The brain is not alone in one’s head.

This other “I” also never feared the black-house spider that had been living in my bedroom for a while. Probably, he sought shelter inside my condo last fall, knowing what an upcoming winter could do to him.

My non-meditating “I” was too afraid to kill him.

I named my new roommate, Arthur.

At first, he was a low-maintenance companion. He kept his distance for safety reasons—and so did I. Eventually, he realized that I was not a threat. Arthur ventured out of the cracks in my walls to the tops of the frames of my Jackson-Pollock-inspired-contemporary paintings. In those days, I fancied and copied the works of painters from the abstract expressionist movement.

The chaos portrayed in them resonated with me.

But often, life imitates art.

One day, while dusting my bedroom furniture, I felt some gravitational force sucking me up. I found myself inside my replica of Pollock’s painting, “Reflection of the Big Dipper.” In a matter of nanoseconds, I became an abstract dot. My physical self evaporated: I became my meditating “I.”

And even if I no longer had ears, I heard Arthur ask, “Female human, where are you now?”

“I’m in my painting . . . How are we communicating? I no longer have ears or a mouth.”

“You’re in the Web of Connectedness,” he said. “We hear everything here without any words being voiced.”

Somehow, I, suddenly, could no longer feel the fear I used to wear heavy like rapper-style chains around my neck. I was elated to be having a real-life, book-worthy experience. I was pulled into an alternate adult version of Charlotte’s Web. Except, I was playing the part of “Wilbur the pig” and Arthur the role of “Charlotte.”            

Arthur eventually disclosed to me that he had been grieving the death of his girlfriend, living the life of a hermit, crawling around aimlessly. But when he had spotted me washing my windows, he figured it was the perfect opportunity to sneak in unnoticed.

Sadly, Arthur lost interest in other females after his soulmate, Arabella, died of something she had ingested. Poor Arthur tried desperately to move on but courting new female spiders seemed like the ultimate betrayal to her. All he wanted, thereafter, was to find a cozy, human nest to spend the remainder of his days: eating and relaxing.

At first, he said that he had despised me for naming him, Arthur. He believed that he deserved a more sophisticated name. And he did not appreciate that I was a bug-o-phobic clean freak. He worried that he was going to starve until my vegetarian diet inspired him to nibble on my house plants. He would also keep the dust mites that I had missed or the occasional fly that flew in as treats.

As time went by in the painting, I started feeling out of sorts. I had a hard time putting a finger on the feeling starting to percolate within me.

“Art, do you ever feel like you don’t exist?” I asked.

“Yes, without my Araboo. She made me whole.”

“I’m heartbroken.”

“About what, Wren?”

“No one has come looking for me after all this time . . . My parents, friends, or boyfriend,” I said and began weeping.

As I spiraled into the quicksand of sadness, I could sense that Arthur had crawled over to the top left rim of the painting to comfort me. He stayed there for a while. And before leaving, he said, “Feel and let go of the pain.”

            I took his advice, and I dropped out of the canvas. The fall hurt despite it being mounted five feet above the ground.

“Arthur, I am out. Where are you?”

He did not answer.

I looked down and he was laying on the floor a couple of feet away from me. I bent down to touch him and realized that he had passed away.

Then the doorbell rang.

I opened the front door to find my parents standing there. My dad held a bouquet in his hands. And he uttered, “Some woman named Arabella texted us that a close friend of yours passed away. She told us to head straight over to your place.”

“Are you okay, Dear?” my mom asked gently as they crossed the threshold of my doorstep.

“Yes, Arthur died.”

“We’re sorry,” they said in unison, looking at me for an explanation.

 “He was an old friend from my university days,” I lied. “We took a class together in paranormal psychology. Arabella is his widow. A lovely woman . . .”

That afternoon, my parents stayed over, and we had lemon tea and ate biscuits in silence. Not surprisingly, they did not know what to say. They had never heard me mention him before. But they could sense the significance his loss had over me.

            I would never know how I ended up in the “Web of Connectedness,” but I knew that I would reconnect with my friend Arthur there again someday.

Soon afterward, I tweeted these words: A #spider (don’t ask) taught me that we all feel lonely, even if a good friend is nearby. After all, we’re all individual entities separated from—everyone and everything