peeling your eyelids back

there's a centipede in the bathroom

art by me

There’s a knocking sound coming from the ac unit in my apartment. It’s constant. It sounds like hail slowly pebbling down behind then the stream of the AC’s perpetual exhaling. It bothered me last night and the night before that, but it’s better than the fear of any sound at all. Garage doors and footsteps and pots and pans and sighing. Now I know when the sounds will be. This is much more fun.

Last week it was all droning. I couldn’t close my eyes without hearing everything and nothing and the possibility of anything. My therapist called it a ‘common reaction to leaving a traumatic environment’. I called it embarrassing. I didn’t think I’d feel it so hard, I’m very good at compartmentalizing and leaving it on the stove and letting it simmer. Keeping things very, very slow. This is where the money will go when it goes, this is when you take a two hour shower, this is where my patience gets very comfortable and waits and waits and waits. It was in the jokes and the cold water I ran over my wrists. Once, it was in my driveway with my car off and my head on the steering wheel. Now it’s in my apartment. It’s very quiet in here. You start to hear the droning behind the knocking at night and there it is again.

It was because of a bug, which is stupid. The day before Thanksgiving and I had curbed about three panic attacks by the time night came. It was all very flattened, the panic, like I’d slammed it between pages in a book and decided to come back to it later. But then later was now and in the shape of a centipede; a five incher crawling up the side of my bathroom wall while all of the lights were off (it was one of those weeks where I kept all of the lights off, there was nothing good to see in that mirror). I panicked. I ran out and grabbed the hand-held vacuum that sometimes emits the smell of smoke, probably from all of the other bugs cooking in there. It ran away from the nozzle, toward me. I thought, This would happen to me. And then, very abruptly, This can’t happen.

My dignity was dried up for the week, which is why I asked. I went upstairs and into the kitchen and watched him sleeping on the couch. I walked up and then back and then up again. I said, “Are you awake? There’s a bug. In my bathroom. I’m sorry. Can you just grab it? I’m sorry.” Everything was embarrassing, my voice was shaking, it wasn’t even that serious.

He groaned and looked at me. He rolled his eyes at whatever he saw and who knows what that was. “Oh please, Savannah.”

I thought, Okay. I went back downstairs. I sat in the chair farthest from my room and sobbed. I thought about driving 45 minutes to my friends house and sleeping on the couch. I thought about the room that the bug was in which was not my room. He’d called me by my sister’s name. He would have killed a bug for his girlfriend. He would have came down if he heard his girlfriend was crying and console her and make a joke and kill the bug so she could sleep.

There’s a certain kind of way that you blink when you remember something you that you already knew. A whole life of expectation that gets shattered. A moment that is an amalgamation of therapies and pattern recognition that, to your dismay, finally makes sense. You could’ve asked for anything, the hoping is the problem. The consequence of wishing is that the embarrassment of not having and continuing to try becomes more exhausting than what the wish will get you. Nothing. It always gets you nothing.

I thought, the bug and I are both stuck in this house. I felt immense camaraderie with that centipede. We were both afraid of the big bad thing in the scary place we didn’t ask to be in. I went into my room and turned off the light and thought about two nights from now when I wouldn’t have to hope for anything anymore. How lucky am I.