I have a new phobia

I dislike insects. They have too many legs, so they can cover a ridiculous amount of ground (or skin) in a few seconds, a lot of the time they try to suck your blood, and they are so tiny they could get lost in your clothes torturing you for days. However, I am not one of those people who scream every time a tiny fly flies around them, or refuse to sit anywhere where there are a couple of ants crawling around. I’m not even a maniac killer, and quite often stop my parents from squashing harmless bugs. Until tonight, the only things I draw the line at are creatures actually crawling on me, mosquitos biting me and causing that limb to swell up to an incredible size, and rather large spiders in general.

Even when two of those things are combined I can control myself, like the time a massive spider actually crawled down my leg in a music lesson, I only stopped myself from screaming and running out the room because my teacher was in the middle of going over my last homework and he would have thought I thought his lesson was a joke and was trying to get out of it. I believe sometimes I give off the impression that I treat all music lessons as jokes, in a good way of course, but sometimes he doesn’t always appreciate it. Anyway.

We have two toilets in our house (this is relevant I promise), one upstairs and one downstairs. In the downstairs one there is also our shower. This evening I went downstairs to apologise to my mother for not having practised the violin for my concert which is a little over a month away (OH SHIT) because I was too busy reading blogs, I mean, working. And then I told her I was going to shower. My sister was all “I claim the downstairs loo first” and I said “oh no you don’t” and we both made a beeline for the downstairs toilet. And as I opened the door, the first thing I saw on the opposite window was the hugest moth I have ever seen in my life. I have only ever seen one which was nearly as huge as that, and that was two years ago. Seriously. This was MASSIVE and BLACK and TERRIFYING. Although not so terrifying to me yet as I wouldn’t go anywhere near it. Since the light wasn’t on and it was clearly trying to find it’s way out of the open window above it, I tentatively went closer to draw the curtains in front of it, in the hope that Icould safely take a shower and it would make its way out the only exit – the window. And then I turned the light on. Lizzy warned me that the moth would try and fly out underneath the curtains towards the light, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t try and fly downwards through a tiny little exit between the ever moving curtain and the windowsill, rather than fly back out the window. I, clearly, have more logic when it comes to freedom than a moth.

So, I was flushing the toilet, facing the window directly, because I flush toilets with my foot. Force of habit, let’s not go into that. And then all of a sudden this massive black fluttering thing appears from beneath the curtain and flies straight at my face. And when I tell you that this thing was the size of a small frog, with a wingspan almost as big as my hand (perhaps a slight exaggeration, and I do have small hands), you should not be surprised that I screamed extremely loudly and ran out.

There are two types of scream in the world. There is the squealy, girly, jumpy scream, and then there is the “I am going to die and I need to let as many people as possible know about this” scream. It lies in the vocal range somewhere between banshee wail and lion’s roar, I believe. And I screamed the latter.

My mother, under the impression that I was being murdered (or rather, under the impression that a spider had decided to play peek-a-boo, as she informed me later) rushed into the kitchen as I came into it, and grabbed me as I began laughing hysterically – not funny hysterical but borderline insane hysterical. This was probably because she thought I’d gone into shock. Note to any doctors who reccommend holding your child tightly if they go into shock: I want a bit of space to breathe here.

Once I’d calmed down a little and had told her that a moth had tried to assault me, she went to try and find, and remove it, from the bathroom. Except she couldn’t find it. It was nowhere to be seen. She looked all around the rooms with lights on, since moths are atrracted to light, and could not find it. And this was when I realised I had a problem. Up until now, I knew I was overreacting at what was just an oversized insect. However, as I was carefully walking around the house contemplating sleeping in my parent’s bed for protection from the moth, and realising that I might have to go into work tomorrow stinking because I would not shut myself in a tiny little room to wash if there was the slightest chance the moth would appear again, I was actually really scared I would suddenly see this moth, and it would come and fly at me again.

Of course, it didn’t help that Lizzy was following me around lightly brushing my arm or rubbing her fingers next to my ear pretending to be the moth.

Finally, she spotted it on the front door keyhole. I shut myself in the kitchen, and let my mother battle with it to get it outside. It took her quite a few minutes, with shouts of “no not that way,” and “Roger will you come and give me a hand here!”.

Eventually it went out the door, just as my dad came down the stairs to help. I was able to shower in peace, but not before adding another criteria to insects I am scared of:

• If they have a butt big enough to hide a gun in
• If they have legs long enough to strangle me
• If they have a wingspan wide enough to suffocate me.

All perfectly rational fears.

Tags: dad, fear, insects, mother, sister, story