RED ANTS.

It was looking in his somber and lively eyes, it was in observing his wide shoulders and his burning desire for living, that he saw the ants again: in disbelief for how long it had been since then, he saw the quiet, mesmerising flow of the diligent arthropods, their flaming colour. The ants, the ants that they both loved each in his own way, back when the man he had in front of him now was still as tall as his legs and when the Sun was shining on them in different ways. The eyes of the kid in the clean pathway recognised a Sun detached from death, ignorant of suffering; meanwhile his own eyes kept turning to forgive the Morning Star, as he'd always done, as he wanted to show to that child.

There: that kid, his eldest grandchild, was a man. And in his veins, he knew, the ants were running fast and busy, enthusiastic and exhausted, carrying all his dreams, all his values, all his hopes, all his ideas. He wondered for a second if the teachings he had tried to leave to him were still there: was the soil of his soul ready to nourish the seeds he left by? He wondered, and the more his eyes fixed on his grandson, the more he knew they did: he could not be sure, he just hoped and believed.

They met the ants when, back when the Sun shun differently, they'd take long walks, and the wind wouldn't blow and it'd be alright that it was so: in the heat of the late morning, just before his daughter would come out, and call his father and his son to lunch, they'd walk along, speaking like rivers or not speaking at all. And insects were what would catch his childish and igniting attention, and he'd smile, he'd think of Virgil and he'd think of Kierkegaard, or maybe it was Nietzsche: he didn't remember it, sixteen years later, and it didn't matter, whichever of them it was he thought of him and smiled faintly, knowing he knew a little more than nothing, being conscious of how valuable that little was. What mattered was that the ants were red from head to the last of the six toes, and walked without ever looking back or stopping, faultless in their job. They walked on and they carried their food, never asking questions: he thought of how we shouldn't ever act like the ants. We shouldn't ever be so mindless. Now he knew, his grandson wasn't an ant.

For a fraction of a second he questioned whether it was a good sign, that he carried those little workers in his soul, in his blood. He realised, in that eternal segment of time that he'd then carry with him in the waves of infinity, that the passion is always worth carrying (he sometimes forgot that in life) as long as it's mitigated by an aim we put on ourselves.

He saw that redness, he remembered his own soul and shivered of a manly sensibility. And he remembered when that kid, when he was small enough, would sit on his lap and read that book about all the animals in the world. They'd look at toucans, they'd look at panthers and they'd feel as if they were in the Galapagos, as if they were in the savannah. And they remembered the ants. And he, he'd ask to go see them again. He'd never seen red ants before. Granted, he'd seen ants with a red head and a black body, but never ants that had the colour of energy splattered across their whole body. And he jumped and lived as if death wasn't a thing.

Ants, he saw the ants in his eyes. And hugged him tight. Didn't wish him luck. He warned him: focus on what you want and what you want to get, son. I love you. And the man, the man who had been his grandson left with a big suitcase and a bigger heart, now knowing what death was, and he stayed there, with his heart still small and brave, and his eyes shining with the wonder of life, of death, of everything and beyond everything.