I want to share with you a fun (super not fun) game I've been playing every night before bed for the last month or so. Did I already mention it's fun (super not fun)?! No, it's not a ~fun game~ to play with your lover before bed... unless of course, your lover is a bed bug. Or perhaps, a hundred bed bugs. Or hopefully, as you'd never imagined this is what you'd hope for in a lover, they are simply a speck or sand or a small critter that closely resembles a bed bug -- maybe a tiny dead ant -- but it is impossible to tell with the naked eye but it is DEFINITELY NOT (but maybe is?) a bed bug.
Here's how you play:
Get all ready for bed. Brush your teeth. Shower. Get into your sleeping clothes. Turn on the 2 fans that you use to make your room a refreshing (still hot as blazes) 75 degrees instead of 80. Then crawl into bed. Depending on the temperature of your room, you can drape your sheet over your body and imagine what it felt like, seemingly so long ago, when you wrapped yourself in warm flannel sheets and a down comforter while a soft blanket of snow covered the ground outside. The times when it was so cold that you had to wear something other than underwear and a baggy t-shirt to bed and when you didn't dare walk around without those stretchy cloth tubes around your feet. What are those things called again? Oh right, socks. A pool of sweat builds in the little luge that leads your nose to your upper lip, and you snap out of that image of you in your previous life.
As you lay still in bed, your multiple bug bites start to make their appearances known to you. Certainly, they are just mosquito bites (unless of course, they're bed bug bites), since they don't follow any if the usual bed bug bite symptoms which are a few little bits in a line. Breakfast, lunch, then dinner. But hey, you might as well check your bed (for the 27th night in a row) to see if any bed bugs survived the insane boiling water and bleaching and spraying rampage you and your roommate went on a month ago.
You turn on the flashlight app on your handphone (cell phone, but Malaysia style) and resume game position: you are crouched on your hands and knees on your mattress with your head only inches above the bed sheet. You inspect the entire surface area of the mattress by shining your light on any speck of dust or lint or sand or dead bug (or possibly live bed bug?!?!?) to determine its identity. Most of the suspects are little balls of lint or the wings of bugs that must have been squished by you in your sleep or suffered some other trauma that left one of their wings on your sheets. You are thankful for those bug wings and lint balls, for they are not bed bugs, and therefore their presence is almost welcomed into your bed. The other things, the little things that you really can't tell if they're just a speck of sand or if they're a bed bug are what really freak you out and as a precautionary measure, you crush the unknowns under your razer sharp (actually pretty dull) fingernails.
But alas, it is way past your bed time, so you decide to call it a night and simply conduct an experiment since you studied science at that's your specialty, obviously. You brush off all the little linties and wingies and the probably not (but maybe?) bed bugs and decide you'll go to sleep with zero specks of anything on your sheets and then when you wake up (assuming you ever fall asleep after traumatizing yourself) you will reassess the situation. You should congratulate yourself, for future graduate school advisors are lining up to offer you research assistantships at their highly ranked institutions because of this revolutionary bed bug experiment in which you have sacrificed yourself as a test subject (awful design, no one wants you to do this in grad school).
Now you allow yourself to think those terribly tempting thoughts about socks and snow on the windowsill and flannel sheets and being the slightest bit cold for once because you deserve to dream about something other than the paranoia of the return of the bed bugs. You are about to fall asleep, but suddenly you have to itch your head. Lice?!?!?!
(No, I don't actually have lice).
This blog, "Uprooted", is not an official Fulbright Program site. The views expressed on this site are entirely those of its author and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.
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