More than once in my life, I have been accused of loving them too much. Those quirky, expulsions of oxygen rich ozone should really be given some credit. Think about this: he began his life as a small piece of an altogether grander thing. He was ripped, cut off, and generally disowned from this warm blanket of togetherness to be trapped in a dank and dismal cage. And what imprisoned him so? What evil deed did he dastardly devise that should keep him ensnared in such a violent manner? His only crime, good people, was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He unfortunately found himself at the edge a seeming precipice of danger and never knew what ominous card fate had dealt.

And yet … after such a traumatic experience as this ripping at the seams of his very being … this little cast off piece of a larger whole has only yet begun a journey that will transform his entire existence. He will cease to be another piece of fat drooping on the underarm of his former life’s entirety. For now, he has a purpose. He may muse that it is simply to endure the hardship he has now fatefully found himself in but, no; this is is not the case. Mere survival in a foreign world wrought with unknown danger is beneath his station now. His quest is one more noble than that.

His adventure will take him plummeting down tunnels of darkness and unseen depth, through endless crashing waves of acid that would sear the flesh off mortal hides, deal him crushing blows while traveling through miles of tortuous canals filled with gorging carrions ready to pick clean any spare nutrients of the poor souls who wander by. But he, the favored one, remains immune to such dangers.

His road will be nearly completed by then. His grand transformation nearly finalized. For you see along his path of change, this little nugget of a grander whole was collecting that which would change him. When he finally emerges from this cocoon of solitude, he will bear the mark of one who battled fierce elements and all that nature could deal; of one who had survived. Once he is expunged from the cavern of his imprisonment, I will fondly call him mine. For he passed through me. He will have become a small part of me that, though he was not mine to begin, he will bear my mark. My scent will be upon him and all will know exactly where he came from.

But to me, the cycle will begin again. Perhaps our paths will cross again, or maybe he will be destined to travel the path of another. Either way, eventually, he will rejoin his whole. He will be reunited with the others of his kind and the world will be complete again. Of course, he will never really have left it, will he? He will merely be disconnected for a time in order to complete a task set aside for him alone to complete. Such is life, I think; such is life.