It's always on in my car, my house, at work. Often it makes me think about pain and suffering I'd rather avoid. Or guilt I should feel about certain things I do or don't do. I'm very suggestible, it seems. Today I heard a story about an apartment building in Brooklyn infested by bedbugs. This otherwise neat and clean family had to throw away all their books and furniture and store their sanitized clothes in plastic bags out of which they'd been living for years. It's a losing war, apparently. Exterminators, pesticides, regular house-cleansing are no match for the buggers - which I learned today are which and look like powder when they're young but grow into brown little specks of dust in adulthood and feed on blood - preferably human.
I've been waking up with strange bites on my legs, but had convinced myself they were from wily mosquitoes working their way under my sheet at night. Not very plausible, I know. But I've managed to believe it and still sleep soundly.
Right after I heard that horrid bedbug story, I rushed home and ripped all the sheets off my bed. Then inspected the mattress pad for white powder or dust particles. Nothing. The sheets are doing a hotwater spin in the washer right now, but I'm itching my legs uncontrollably as I right this. (It takes a very long time to type when you have to keep stopping to scratch.)
I can't stop thinking how my bed might look bug-free, but the lady in the radio story thought her couch was too. And then right in the middle of the broadcast, she pulls up a cushion and finds a BEDBUG COLONY and starts freaking out. That's when I nearly swerved off the road reaching for a spot on my ankle that felt like it was crawling in bugs.
There could be bugs in the mattress I'm just not seeing. They're hiding out until I go to sleep. Maybe like cockroaches that scatter when the light comes on. And I don't know where my mattress has been. It's a hand-me-down from my sister who got it from a family friend who was kind of old and who knows how long he had it or where it was before then. And it's spent weeks travelling across the country in a hot, storage container, sitting in truck beds in the open air. And I already know bugs THRIVE down here in the humid, hot South.
I doubt I'll sleep well tonight.
2 comments:
jules, it might be time for a new bed.. i cant believe Larry's bed is still comfortable. that's amazing.. and i started to itch the minute i started to read your blog. thanks for that.
YEP, I agree! Get a new mattress just for the sake of it, and your sanity!
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