misc: amanda cries thinking about a shrimp.

In memoriam of my red cherry shrimp, Ernest Shrimpleton 2022–2023.

I was cleaning my house yesterday and picked up a box. What I found underneath was a mummified red cherry shrimp. Shrimp are known for being escape artists, and he went almost 5 feet across my kitchen until it dried out and died.

When I found the shrimp, I was filled with grief. I struggled to pick up the tiny body on the floor through tears. First, I used a piece of paper to try and slide underneath it. It kept falling off. Then, I grabbed it ever so gently by the tail, barely grasping as though it would shriek.

I put the shrimp in the trash can and I felt the loneliness of what it must be like to be a god. How it must feel to create worlds for small creatures, to turn your love into husbandry, and to watch your heart turn into an ecosystem. How it feels to know they escaped the boundaries of their refuge, and died in their hubris. And yet, to be proud of them for climbing to the limits of what they could do.

This little shrimp was so brave to leave my tank, and to crawl down from my kitchen counter, across my kitchen floor, and underneath my Amazon box where he ultimately died. He explored until he paid the ultimate price for his curiosity.

I can’t help but think — was he scared? Did he miss his shrimp friends? Was he having the time of his life? Did he even realize he was in an environment that no longer supported him, or was the ecstasy of novelty blinding?

Whatever he thought, the end result is the same. Whatever he experienced, he still crawled in the exact opposite direction from home. He was a small, but brave explorer.

You want your creatures to explore every inch of what you’ve given them, but you cannot protect them from their own errors. And when they die, as they all will, you have nothing to do but to stand in the echo of their life and think of how you eclipsed it.

You have nothing to give to the dead thing but respect and kindness, not because the dead thing feels pain — but because you do. Because you must continue moving forward in your own life, watching hundreds of small deaths of things beneath you. The only reconciliation you can give yourself about the death is how you handle it.

If no external forces are around to pressure you to act kind, the only restraint against cruelty is you. What do you do for a creature that created another chore for you, and feels nothing? What kind of god does that make you?

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is say good morning to the fish and kiss their tanks. I leave small post-it notes on their glass that says “I love you”. I write notes to them using expo marker on the glass. I fill their spaces with lush plants, and spend my free time on Reddit helping other people with aquariums learn how to create their own worlds.

When I come home, I first and foremost go to my fish tanks. I check on each fish, looking to make sure they are healthy, and live another day.

When they die, I grieve them beyond comprehension. I come home in fear of dead animals. I fear having to live through the greater world without having my own world to take care of, a sentence to life without purpose. Another reminder that death is the only ending and as much as I play god, I may have to answer to one someday.

We cannot control the gods above us, but we can control what kind god we are. If I am indifferent to the small shrimp I found, I cannot blame a god for being indifferent to my own strife.

We have no reason to care about a tiny dead body we know we will find, but we do. We have the opportunity to become something even more rare than being alive: being kind.

I hope if a god comes to find me at the end of my days, it’ll treat me the same way I treated my shrimp. I want it to realize how far I have come, how brave I had to be. To mourn not at its’ scale, but at the scale of the creature to which its’ tending.

And no matter its’ size or power, I hope it treats my body with a kindness unfettered by death, and a love that enables it to understand that even if my life is small to it, it was everything to me.