I Was Seen by a Spider

Every inhabited space, especially the boxy modern apartment, is the concrete manifestation of a structure.

It embodies our desire for order: immaculate white walls, smooth stone surfaces, glassware catching the light, even windows that stretch the room beyond its physical boundaries. We invent rituals—cleaning, sweeping, vacuuming, endless machines and gestures—to maintain this fantasy of stability. This is not wrong. But it is exclusionary by nature, built for humans, by humans.

Yet these structures are never truly sealed off from the world. They are permeable—sometimes despite, sometimes because of their design.

Dust, spores, silverfish, cockroaches, and—yes—spiders find their way in. Their presence is not just a flaw in our architecture, but a reminder that the structure itself exists over the space, not as the space; And that the capacity for intrusion, the potential to harbor the other, is itself part of what makes a space real.

To recognize their presence is to acknowledge two things at once:

First, that every structure is layered over a more fluid, entangled reality; Second, that this space, however controlled, always contains the possibility of the nonhuman. This is the beginning of post-structuralism—not a rejection of structure, but an awareness of its limits, its permeability, its need for ongoing negotiation.

For each being, the world is redrawn through its own senses—a "perceptual world" that warps and folds the space, twisting the structure we built.

Our lines and walls, drawn for ourselves, become only one of many possible maps. The appearance of a spider is not just a passive occupation, but an act that observes and even disrupts our structure, shifting the center, creating tension, forcing us to see what has always been there.

To admit the edge-dweller—the cockroach, the spider, the unwanted guest—is to admit myself, too, as a being who survives in the margins of other people's order.

To be seen by a spider is to realize that, for a moment, the map has shifted, and the possibility of another world flickers into being.

It is not about victory.
It is not about transformation.
It is about making room for the gentle, uneasy trembling of structure,
and letting that trembling be enough proof:
It exists.
As I exist.

Like the stick insect at the end of Disco Elysium, seen only by the one who truly listens, I do not ask for recognition—only that my presence, too, is possible.