stop bugging me

(No, this has absolutely nothing to do with the car I drive.)

Don’t we all have at least one completely irrational fear from our childhood which has somehow molded our existence with forces beyond the power of sanity and reason into what it is today? I’d venture to suggest that those of you who lay claim to being totally rational in all of your fears are either lying, aliens from another planet, or scared of what other people might think of you (Rational fear. People and what they think are scary.). However, if you choose to proclaim your lack of fright to mankind, I’ll try to refrain from commenting.

My irrational fear, as most of you unfortunately already have knowledge of, is bugs. Like all of them. Spiders, crickets, centipedes, spiders, anything that flies (excluding flutterbys, because, well, that would just be silly), spiders, and everything else with more than the normal amount of legs. But here’s the deal: I have reasons. Rational ones.

It all started with a faint memory I have of my sister standing on the stage of the Pea Green Community Building in Delta chanting “…some little bug’s gonna get you someday…”. To this single phrase, I accredit all of the uncontrolled screeching and dancing around while batting wildly at the air that took place at random intervals throughout the rest of my formative years. Later I learned this phrase is part of a poem with an obscure meaning that has nothing to do with actual creepy crawly bugs, but at the tender age of three the meaning was glaringly black and white to my small mind. My older sister, which I thought the world of, was talking about spiders, of course. What else could she be saying? And she said one of them was going to ‘get’ me someday. I believed her. Wholeheartedly.

Even though I was absolutely terrified of all bugs from that point on, I somehow developed an unmatched fascination for them at the same time. What a toxic combination that was! Every instance in which a bug would show up in my life, I was faced with a dilemma. My legs wanted to charge off in the general direction of safety but the rest of me wanted to stay to find out what kind of unholy creation that was anyway, resulting in a fair amount of what I can only term as ‘running around’. I even recall having an entire collection of jars in odd array sitting on the windowsill in the living room for the sole purpose of keeping my creepy little enemies as pets. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Those horrid six- and eight-legged creatures became the theme of my nightmares for years, even up to this day when the prisons on the windowsill have long since disappeared.

However, to my dismay the bugs have not disappeared with them. Somehow they still seem to show up in every available dark corner and crevice in my life, real and imaginary. Do they view me as a friend or do they have malicious intentions toward my life? Just a question I ask myself daily. An ‘irrational’ fear I address daily.

-ck

P.S. At this moment, I happen to have a spider abiding in the corner of my shower. I like to count it as a sign of maturity in myself that I have let him live primarily in peace for several months now, although I don’t really appreciate it when he creeps out of his corner. The unspoken rule between us: I leave him alone as long as he leaves me alone.