Sueño causado por el vuelo de una abeja alrededor de una granada un segundo antes de despertar. Dalí

(click on the image)

Why is our way suddenly closed?

In the early summer I was studying for my Arabic exam during the weekends and in the afternoon I noticed that there was this kind of wasp coming inside my room for a number of days. It flew inside and up towards the ceiling landing on a kind of grey thing that was attached to a pipe. My mind was telling me that the grey little thing might be something not supposed to be there but I preferred to think it was just that the paint of the pipe was coming off.  

One evening I got scared from the wasp and closed the window. I was so frightened when I watched how that creature persistently tried to come inside the room but found its way blocked by the glass. I started to reconsider what the grey thing might be. 

I talked about this with some friends on a Saturday night and decided to buy strong insect repellent to kill the stubborn wasp by putting the liquid on the grey thing. I got to the pharmacy (at 3:00am) and spent some time looking at the different kinds of products. I realized the ‘grey thing’ was a wasp nest. My thoughts rushed inside my head like a rollercoaster: ‘A wasp nest inside my bedroom’; ‘I’ve been sleeping with that thing for a month’; ‘What am I going to do at 3:00am on a Saturday night?’; ‘Am I just exaggerating and I should just sleep there and wait until tomorrow to call the super?’  The instructions on the products were not helping my paranoia: ‘Kills the queen that starts the colony’ (so that weird kind of wasp was no less than ‘the Queen’); ‘Place traps in early Spring to catch the Queens and help prevent yellow jacket problems in the season. Use additional traps in the Summer and Fall to catch the workers’ (or was it just a worker?); ‘Kills larvae and pupae in nests’. 

I kept repeating to myself as I was walking back home: ‘A wasp nest inside a bedroom’….. 

The super removed the nest. I think there was nothing inside yet and the construction was just ‘in progress’.  

I thought about how this wasp had found an open entrance to a room for many days in a row. I leave my window open early in the morning when I leave for work and only close it late at night. I also thought about the insect’s reaction when it suddenly found that the way to its nest was closed. I imagined how it went back to the colony and somehow communicated to them that they had to start all over somewhere else or that this season they could count with one nest less.  

But mostly I thought about how the reason for the window being closed is logical for me and impossible for the wasp to comprehend. 

I thought that sometimes in our lives we suddenly find our way blocked and we are not able to understand why. Maybe the explanation is not reachable for us. Maybe we were building our life in a place that was not supposed to be.