I.          "Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the ground
                   will struggle for it." ~ Solomon Northup

Small iridescent worms—plated in sparkling sequins—feast on the dead, scrounging for survival while scraping the ocean’s depth. Their glittered scales can be found chipped and damaged, not from predators but from fighting. These worms battle it out with one another on the abyssal plains, and like most other worms, Peinaleopolynoes are blind. They fight so their scales can feel the brush of beauty as they clang and scrape and bruise against each hardened blow. You can tell how seasoned the warrior is by the colors they bear; blue scales are the thickest, unbending from countless brawls, while white scales are the weakest, still untouched by the collage of shimmer—flimsy from delicate birth. 
            “Glitter worms” are more than just bottom-feeding brawlers, they’re dancers. Peinaleopolynoes waltz with each other, a gentle melody playing in their worm brains. I wonder what worm love looks like—silent music and a crescendo eventually parting their little bodies? 
            I bet becoming a fashionable armor-encrusted worm wouldn’t be too bad. Imagine, you wake up as a worm—all blind and wriggling—and then you proceed to march about the sandy dunes of the ocean, dancing, fighting, and scrounging your way through life. How exhausting.

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      II.          “The oceans, it turns out, are full of bone-eating worms” ~ Helen Scales, 
                    The Brilliant Abyss

I like to think my joy was born with these worms. At the end of the Ordovician era, five mass extinctions ago, I may have been a three-eyed shrimp, awakened by rainwater; floating along nether currents without a thought, when out of the corner of my third eye, I may have spotted a glistening thing. A hiding thing, just out of birth, writhing from the sand with its raw life. And as a three-eyed shrimp, I would have witnessed this birth three-fold, and it may have been so overwhelming—my shrimp brain fell in love just then.
            I’ve decided that if I ever meet a genie and that genie could grant me three wishes: my first wish would be for all the stars in the sky to suddenly melt and seep their way through space, down to Earth; my second wish would be for all the living things to find themselves fully encased in melted star, sheaths of glittering eternity bound to everything; and my third wish would be for all of it, all at once, to stop. The sun burning, the people talking, the worms writhing, everything would go still. And from far away, Earth would appear to be a little sparkling orb at the edge of the universe—glistening in perfect peace.
            A worm’s joy is like spilling sadness on the table and having nothing to wipe it up with. It flows and pours silently onto the floor, waiting to be mopped and forgotten.
 

      III.          “The worm moves onward, true to its purpose, to the earth what alveoli 
                      are to the lungs.” ~ Angela Abraham

When I think about how small I am, I realize the weight of the universe. And it makes me sad. And all that sadness weighs me down, and I feel stuck. My lungs can’t take all that heaviness. Cause I’ve got asthma, and the thing about asthma is that it gets you stuck. 
            When I think about a worm’s sadness, I start to wish worms could cry. I convince myself that worms are entirely incapable of suffering or emotion; I’m lying to myself. I imagine a worm shedding tears that melt away its joy, eventually rising from the dirt and the sea to starve again. Worms waterlogged with sadness—fighting and dancing with everything.