Therapy

My biggest qualm about moving into a garden-level apartment was the prospect of bugs. Because this is basically a basement, I thought, there may be more bugs in this apartment than in one on a higher floor. But, I argued with myself, because this apartment has always been an apartment--a variety of historical features prove that this is not just a remodeled utility space--it's not a basement in the usual sense.

As it turns out, plain old basement or not, there are bugs. Not beetles, spiders, or ants, though. I think they're all being eaten by the centipedes. And centipedes are our least favorite variety of bug. Even Eric, who thinks bugs are cool and will not hesitate to pick up a beetle with his bare hand, hates them. This is because they are incredibly fast, often incredibly large, and they have too goddamn many legs. We had some in our last place, but we only started seeing them in the spring, and then we only saw one every week or two. Here, we see them once a day on average. Just now, I found a squished one on the carpet I vacuumed yesterday, which means either the cats killed it or the things are so ubiquitous we're now stepping on them by accident.

The good news is that this hasn't caused me to collapse drooling into a corner of the couch, like it might have a year ago. Instead of losing my mind every time I see a centipede, I kill it, flush its corpse down the toilet, and move on with my life. This is huge progress considering that I used to be physically unable to get within a four-foot radius of a centipede (which is not nearly close enough to kill it), and the first time we saw a large one in our old apartment, I spent most of the night awake, imagining centipedes crawling over every inch of the place in the dark.

Now I've made the sensible decision that if they're going to be a fact of life, I might as well treat them that way. As long as the centipedes understand that they are to stay off of me, and that I have the right to kill them on sight, we can live together peacefully.