Skin crawling

I’m going to gender stereotype here a wee bit by saying anyone who knows me well enough knows that I’m just like most other girls – that is, bugs and insects will send me running for the hills with my arms in the air like a cartoon character. Anyone who has lived with me will know this fear of creepy-crawlies is near crippling, often reducing me to a tearful, shivering mess.

Last night, I became that mess.

I was lucky that my boyfriend, Sam, had come over from Tauranga to see me for the weekend, so I was not alone when the unthinkable happened. We’d long since gone to sleep, but as I haven’t yet gotten used to sleeping next to another person, it was a relatively broken sleep, and whenever Sam moved, I’d wake up. At around 4am, Sam turned over. I too, turned over and adjusted the blankets around me. As I did this, I felt something sharp on my waist.

I’d like to think my movements were lightning quick at this point. I slammed my hand to my skin, pinching whatever the sharp thing was between my fingers, and uttering a loud swear word, which was enough to rouse Sam from his light slumber. He leaned up and looked at me, and I could just make out his confused face in the faint light from the moon shining through my pitifully thin curtains.

“Sorry, Sam, I really need to turn on the lamp,” I said.

I leaned over and flicked the switch on, bringing my hand in front of my face to inspect the mysterious sharp thing between my fingers.

Friends, I don’t know what out of the following events was more horrifying – seeing the solitary cockroach leg in my hand and not knowing where the rest of it was, or feeling a tickle further up my back, slamming my hand onto my shoulder, and feeling it squish into the ends of my hair and onto my skin.

The next ten seconds were spent flailing around in absolute terror as I realised what had happened, while Sam looked on in bewilderment, still half asleep and not understanding my distress. Now, some people may think me ridiculous, but cockroaches are right up there with spiders as the most terrifying and disgusting bugs in my books. I can’t stand them. It doesn’t just mean I think they’re gross, it means I will literally start throwing things off my shelves and pulling half my hair out when faced with the task of removing a cockroach on my own. My brain just goes into freak-out mode, so by this point, I was sobbing my heart out while poor Sam tried to figure out what was going on.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, sounding suitably concerned.

“There’s – there’s a  – there’s a cockroach under my hand,” I whimpered hysterically. “It’s on my back, under my hand. It’s in my hair! I THINK I SQUISHED IT!”

I’ve tidied up the dialogue for this post, but in reality my words were a lot less coherent, with a lot more bad words, and a lot more crying.

“What do you want me to do, Babe?” Sam asked, looking sympathetically at the tears coursing freely down my cheeks.

“I don’t know!” I wailed.

Keeping my hand plastered to my shoulder, where the villain of the story was still twitching away, I edged off the bed and into the middle of the room. gathering up all my courage (the same kind of courage you have to gather to take the lid off the jar when you’ve trapped a bug inside it), I threw the monster to the floor, shook myself like a wet dog, and started crying even more uncontrollably than I had been before.

I’d like to say that even though a simple bug reduced me to such a state, I’m not a completely pathetic human being. There’s something about waking in the middle of the night and feeling something crawling across your skin, and realising it’s made its way up into your hair, that will simply destroy any small modicum of composure one retains. I’ve never been good with bugs, it’s my irrational fear, and this was all just too much for me.

Sam scrambled out of bed and wrapped his arms around me, rubbing my back as I cried into his chest, still shaking. Then, being surprisingly cooperative for how sleepy he must have been, he came with me to the bathroom, where I got him to wipe my shoulder with a flannel and check my hair for any stray cockroach bits. He went to retrieve the offender from my bedroom floor and flush it down the toilet.

“You wanna know what’s gross?” he said, “it’s still alive.”

That didn’t really make me feel any better.

I think I may be a bit jittery for the next few days.

A taste for the finer things

I wandered into the rumpus room of my grandparents house yesterday to play on their baby grand piano while I’m here visiting. I noticed, with a grimace, that there was a big, brown spider dead (thankfully) behind the piano chair. Possessing no desire to move it or in fact touch it in any way, I sat down and ignored it.

I could not say the same for my cat, Tonka.

As he waltzed into the room behind me, he was immediately drawn to the small, food-sized bug in the corner. As I sat down to play I distinctly heard a crunching noise, and shuddered.

It was only when I came back into the room later in the evening that I realised Tonka had left all this behind: 

Someone obviously isn’t a fan of the legs.

Flashbacks

My flatmate’s family came to visit today, which was nice.

We all sat in the living room watching as her little brother and his friend devoured numerous bags of lollies that they’d bought from Armageddon.

And so began the age-old game of open-your-mouth-and-let-me-see-if-I-can-throw-a-jellybean-in-there. As was inevitably going to happen, my flatmate lost a lolly somewhere down her shirt, and as she wiggled around and awkwardly fumbled through her clothes trying to find that elusive lolly, I was taken back to a time in my childhood, long ago, when I’d befriended an ant, named him Anthony, and let him crawl onto my hand.

Anthony eventually crawled up my sleeve, and try as I might, I never managed to find him after that. Not unlike Anthony, that lolly disappeared down my flatmate’s shirt, never to return.

Oh Anthony. Where fore art thou Anthony?

Imagine the horror

I realised today that I’m not afraid of crane flies. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, seeing as I’m afraid of virtually every bug in existence, with spiders being – if not at the top – very high on the list.

Crane flies are like spiders with wings. Unless I am much mistaken, that is the worst possible thing in the entire world. So why am I not afraid of them?

My friends, I am baffled.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back outside

All this time I thought we were safe.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I saw it, just out of the corner my eye. It was waiting, silently, lurking in my peripheral vision. Waiting for me to lower my defenses? I could only guess. Whatever the case, it wanted me. I could feel it.

For any non-kiwi readers, you have to understand that New Zealand doesn’t have too many spiders to worry about. The ones I see around the most are Daddy-Long-Legs. Those things are a dime a dozen, and completely harmless to humans. Sure, we have nasty looking Nursery Web spiders, but from what I understand they’re pretty harmless too. I sure hope they are. Oh man, I really hope they are.

Anyway, we don’t have horrifically large spiders here, at least, that’s what I thought. 

Here I was, minding my own business, sitting on the couch at Mum’s house, idly looking out the window, when I saw what can only be described with the word ‘behemoth’.

Like, this spider looked like a freaking weta. He was about half, maybe three quarters the size of my palm, and he had a frighteningly thick body.

When I went outside to take a closer look at him and maybe get a photo, he was gone, and when I came back inside Mum thought it would be funny to pretend he was on my back. The sound that came out of my mouth when I thought that monster was crawling around on the back of my shirt was not human.

I’ve still got the shakes.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Last year my flatmate Sacha had bought herself a loaf of specialty bread from the supermarket to have with hummus.

She’d already eaten a bit of it, and the rest was sitting wrapped up in its little paper bag in the pantry.

Sacha, I’ve noticed, likes her snacks. She’ll sit down with her crackers and cheese, or her avocado on cruskits, and she’ll just look so happy munching away on her mini meal.

Anyway, she looked very pleased with herself as she took the bread out of the pantry and the hummus out of the fridge, but as she opened the paper bag, a cockroach came scrambling out of it.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on Sacha’s face as she quietly closed the paper bag back up and dejectedly walked over and dropped it into the bin.

That was the face of heartbreak.

SOS

I have survived a night alone in my house without being murdered, or having a visit from our friendly, coffee-making ghost.

It’s pretty cool not having to put clothes on when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and it’s pretty cool getting to stay in the shower as long as I want and not worry about getting told off for wasting the hot water – not that I’ve yet been told off, but the pressure is definitely off when there’s nobody else home.

The only problem is that nobody is here to help me get rid of the spider sitting in my bedroom doorway.

Help.

The big questions

If you dropped a spider from a great height, would it die when it hit the bottom? Or would it flutter down on the breeze like a fine, gossamer thread, landing ever so lightly on an unsuspecting passerby?