*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors

A week back I was removing a mirror from my bathroom wall.

Because mirrors tend to scare me. Due to my face being in them. And maybe yours. Maybe even Bloody Mary’s, and I owe that leaky bitch some cash, so...

Anyhoos.

Being in the midst of a complete crib remodel, I was decked out in a respirator and goggles to protect my face from various flying debris, staring at myself in the very mirror which was being pulled down. Such a strange sight, to see a person who is convinced that they are in the process of construction when they are so obviously in the uniform and trappings of destruction.

Life is like, poetic and stuff.

Immediately after ignoring my ironic image and pulling the mirror from the wall, I noted a strange vertical squiggle in the newly exposed sheetrock. Before closer inspection, it simply looked like a tear in the surface, as if some adhesive from the mirror’s back side had anchored well, and I’d ripped a piece of the substrate off with. But something wasn’t completely right about that assumption. The mark was about six inches long and perhaps a centimeter wide, with specks of dirt around the edges like a halo of broken dreams.

And a freeway of little pale ant-looking things parading past one another like satan’s lice as they did their best to consume the brittle walls containing my sanity.

Oh, they’re all over the place. Everywhere. Even in your back yard. Just turn the dirt and you’ll find the little blind bastards. Chillin’ under the surface, laying in wait, talking amongst themselves and making plans to completely ruin your life.

Like Al Qaeda.

But they’re termites.

Perhaps they are termites planted by Al Qaida. Hard to be sure of anything in these post 9/11 days. They do live in caves, after all. Cagey fuckers.

At first, I was in denial. The house is brick with a cement foundation, goddamnit. Sure, there’s wood in the interior but COME ON. Termites are blind opportunists. Why would they go poking around what would appear to them to be a big-ass rock, in hopes of finding lumber/food?

Why? To piss me off, of course.

Lucky for me, they’re the subterranean variety (annoying) and not the dry-wood variety (bank-breaking). My house didn’t need the big-top-tent treatment in order to get things under control. Treating the burrowing variety isn’t that big of a deal: you hire a company to come out, spray around your foundation, cut holes in your walls and foam up any of the plumbing gaps in your foundation with termicide, and yada-yada-yada, it ain’t cheap, but it’s cheaper than hiring a carpenter to replace your home’s interior.

That didn’t faze me much.

What did faze me was how I reacted to my decision to viciously curtail the use of my domicile as a cellulose buffet.

In most situations, I consider myself a logical pragmatist who periodically ventures out into territory that some might see as “cold” or “unfeeling”. Not that I have a problem with empathy, because I see the pain, whatever the issue may be. But oftentimes I just willingly choose to ignore it for a whole host of reasons. Like when you hear about a guy who got electrocuted whilst breaking into a Pawn Shop, or a woman who is eaten by her own pet bear, or Christian Missionaries who are “abducted” during missions to countries which everyone knows are currently ruled under strict Islamic law. Not that anyone necessarily deserves to have bad shit happen to them, because that’s absurd, but come on. If you actively, willingly court a particular disaster then you can’t expect me to come crying atop the crest of an empathy tidal wave when that exact horrible shit comes knocking on your door in a rented tux and flowers to take you to the World-Of-Shit Prom. There’re too many real tragedies out there to bother with fake ones.

Which brings me ‘round to the termites.

It’s not like they knew what they were doing. They aren’t capable of discerning what is or isn’t the home of a termite-murdering, chemical-wielding human being. In fact, it’s pretty fair to say that the only difference between the wood used in the construction of my home and that of a dead tree in a forest, is the amount of vanity I place on the dead wood in my walls. My ego is the only thing separating the dead trees in my house from the dead trees in my yard, nothing more. I’ve no doubt that they crawled up through some hole in my foundation, just blindly wandering around in search of some dead roots, perhaps a sweet stump or what-have-you, and when they entered my walls they were like “what the fuck kind of tree is this?”

And then they commenced to destroying it.

But it’s not like roaches where it’s OBVIOUS that they know they aren’t supposed to be in the house. I fully believe roaches are FULLY aware that they’re intruding. Those fuckers RUN when you turn the lights on, fleeing like a tucked-tail dog that got caught digging through the goddamn trash (again). They’re completely aware of their tempestuous relationship with humans within a human household, and they’ve adapted to benefit from it.

But these termites were just going about their business, completely oblivious to the fact that they had ruined my month. Oblivious to the fact that my home is not, in fact, just some random dead tree. Oblivious to my face that was literally six inches from their wood-gnawing bodies in my bathroom wall, in the exact spot where my destructive image used to reflect back at me.

Oblivious to my desire to end them.

And that’s what brings me pause.

What of their families? All those tunnels and mounds they’ve been building for all those generations? Their dreams for the future? Little nymphs playing around their Christmas trees, just before devouring the shit out of it and all the paper-wrapped gifts beneath. What about them?

I mean, they’re just in this game for the same reason we are, right? To keep the clock ticking for our respective genetic lines? Maintenance and promotion? Why did they have to put me in such an uncomfortable position as to be forced to choose between the health of their colony and the health of my crib? Why couldn’t they just pick an actual goddamn dead tree to devour instead?

But these questions are useless to pose. I know, because I posed them to the termites and got no direct, usable response. I got more of a deflection. In fact, their collective deflection was a mixture between death and retreat. In silence. Just like they arrived.

And since then I’ve gone back to my destructive-construction tendencies.

I take solace in knowing that they’ll be back. That it’s a constant process, and that one day, with or without me allowing it to happen, they’ll successfully eat the architectural pattern of dead trees that I call home. But I haven’t had the heart to put that mirror back up just yet.