Cockroaches and Life

From Fiction Packet Three I liked the last story, "The fifth story." This story was broken up into the author telling us how he would write there different stories, apparently about the same instance.  The author is also the character, who I will refer to as "her/she" here forward.  She began by talking about how if she had 1000 and one nights to write, she would write 1000 and one stories about this topic.  Cockroaches, that is the topic.

She hates cockroaches and they are taking over her apartment.  She describes how they come from a few units below, and belong to that unit, but once she kills them, they become part of her unit, she says.  I felt that the way she went through the three stories was really cool.  They all began with her being overheard complaining about roaches.  The detail in the writing is just enough that you feel like you're there. 
"An angry fear and my own evil guided me.  Now I coldly wanted one thing only: to kill every cockroach in existence."

That was from the first story, in which a person who overheard her suggested she make a mix of poison (that the person provided) and kill them that way.  The first story is her making the mix, and getting really excited about killing the roaches, and enjoying their deaths.

The overall story then continues to go through the same scenario, but with different small things happening and different focus'.  All three really captured the momentary connection that she had with the cockroaches, as if killing them was preceded by an odd bond.

This story was the one that stuck out to me the most from the packet, sadly it was at the very end.  I think, like anything, that this story can be metaphoric to life in other ways.  Anytime we have an issue that keeps recurring, we find ourselves telling a story.  The story might be why it is the way it is, or how it is we cannot fix our problem.  Some stories blame someone else, or something else, but we all have a story for our problems.  The story changes, even though the source of the story, the problem in your life, does not.  How strange, to think that cockroaches can be compared to procrastination, or chronic lateness, or overeating.  Ev en though we cannot prevent cockroaches like we can prevent these other things, once cockroaches exist in our domain, the process to get rid of them is the same. 

To get rid of the cockroaches, the author dedicated her passion temporarily to their demise.  This dedication was sparked by a decision to kill them.  This decision cut off any other possibility.  These cockroaches were going to die no matter what.  With procrastination, or some other habit we hate but maintain anyway, we must dedicate the same passion to 'kilking' it.  It is something that we do subconsciously anyway, like in this story with the cockroaches. 

I think that is all we can learn from that story, for now.