We are spiders, though only showing half of our limbs to the casual viewer. Yes, we have just four to walk stairs and climb ladders with, but there are others — for social ascent, occupational strides, and hanging on to love, maybe, though they could be for anything else.

We are spiders, and we trail a single string of us, our history and opinions and experiences, and as we turn in circle upon circle we leave behind a complex web of people and places that are bound to us.

We are spiders, and things get caught in our lives. Stuck in our web, they flail madly and desperately to escape, but wind up inexorably tied to all of our people and places as they thrash, leaving our once-perfect display of natural geometry in a tangle of bent angles and broken connections.

We are spiders, and our webs are not permanent structures. They can be elaborately expanded upon, or casually discarded, leaving us with just that single string of thread to create anew.

We are spiders, spending our whole lives weaving and catching and crawling and expanding, but sometimes the old web seems in such a state of disrepair that we should take our single thread and start again, keeping some elements but eschewing the rest, leaving our old structures to decay on the branches we hung them upon.

We are spiders, and I am arachnophobic.