So once upon a time there was a house full of humans, whose laughter undulated like a school of sardines though the ocean.  Most evening they sang happily, but other they were angry and distraught; they stared at each other and felt each other’s sadness and joys as if it were their own.  They were unfazed by the irregularity of their happiness, by the ups and downs of their innermost fears and hesitations.  They simply lived, without question. 

One day a little cricket snuck into the house.  In the beginning, the cricket was terribly annoying, and hardly anyone could stand the sounds it made at night.  The cricket shifted their awareness, took their attention, and became the focus of their evenings. The cricket was constantly to blame for the mood in the house.

Time passed; no one had been able to neither cage the little cricket nor take it away, and certainly not silence it.  Sure as night falls, the cricket returned.  Louder and louder… At first the sound was grinding and rattling but as time went on it became chirping and melodic.  Slowly the humans mobilized their attention around the joy that their gossip, concern, and attention to the cricket produced. They had more happiness than not, and this was also simple, but not simple anymore for the cricket.  The cricket had become swollen with human concern, the cricket had seen its image in the mirror and could no longer discern whether the cricket itself was a source of joy or a source of pain, or even whether it was still a… cricket…

One night the cricket stopped making sounds, and all anyone could hear was their own heart throbbing and pounding. At once everyone seemed troubled by the sound of their own heart, by the absence of the cricket, by the irregular pulse that they couldn’t recognize nor remember.  They looked high and low for the cricket, and the cricket looked for itself, but no one could find it, neither could the cricket find anyone.

When the sun came up the next day, there was a flat echoing sound, a soulful weeping, longing, until the house silenced completely. It was too late, it was the end of en era, and nothing would ever be the same.