Today
My awakening came today. As I'm typing this, I'm still not sure whether to continue talking about my cleaning ordeal. It still has its fresh burrow in my memory: skittering, crawling, crunching. I'm not bothered by many things, but I'm reassessing that. Though I'm no stranger to insects, like many I prefer the more troublesome ones to not be within my walls. Even so, I normally tolerate them. Letting the occasional spider or house fly on its way through the perpetual cycle across the rim of the window. The fly will often bump its compound eyes against the glass while the spider levitates: eight gracious legs spinning in their meditative stance. Their circular existence brings intrigue, but in the mildest flavor.
While I rarely mind anything small crawling or flying, I surprised and embarrassed myself when I ended this evening recoiling back from the roaches shooting out from under piles of litter in the boiler room. A year from when I'd walked into the Florida apartment, my demeanor had begun as a passive flowing energy and coagulated into something hot and unmoving. My sticky sweat that never quite slid off of my body only hastened this process. I was a bitter vessel of rage, pulverizing any brown oval speeding across the floor. Any shape moving at the corner of my eye brought me into a frenzy. Their sudden maneuvers made me jump. I craved annihilation from the shoe. In the end, I couldn't understand what brought me to that state.
It was a far cry from the large roach standing perpendicular to my face on a poster over my bed four years ago. I'd just looked up and stared at it in relaxed curiosity. Little concern came about where it might go or what it might do, I'd simply let it sit and disappear. Roaches were never a problem for me back then. As far as I was concerned, they stayed in tight spaces where I was not. They were no more of a problem than a wasted post it note. But something has changed in me all these years. A heightened warlike instinct that has devoured my core, but only slowly. Perhaps that's what makes it worse. The slow burn. A slow eating within I had little knowledge of until it bore itself in the milky flesh of twitching helpless legs.
The eating started as what I could only picture as a large man shouting at his game counsel on the floor above me. He did it every night and occasionally at noon. The shouts came out childish, but loud. A hard thud followed. Sometimes I wondered if the wall would crack and would dismiss the thought as silly. That never stopped me from locking the door, however. If not the front door, the door to my room. As far as I was concerned, my bathroom and bedroom were my inner sanctum. My roommate could let in coons elsewhere in the unit for all I cared. But if any body or thing came into my room, it was game over.
I never had too much concern for a break in from the upper floor, but that didn't stop me from pondering his strange existence. Night after night, I tried to picture his conundrum in greater detail. A late twenties man shooting up from his couch, shouting at his TV, slamming down his heavy figure to the seat, repeating the movement three times a round, several times a night, around four days a week. A perfect circular motion of events. I could never picture his clothes, other than some blank large gray shirt and basketball shorts over his swollen middle. His shouts were too irate for a sports fan watching the competition in third person. This was a game much more personal to him. He was at the control board, his opponent someone or something not currently in the room with him, but besting him every time in strategy or spirit.
Whoever it was, had captured this person in some twisted sort of groundhog day. Every time the shouts came, they delivered in the same cadence, rhythm, and storyline. At night, it locked him in a perpetual state of war, no way out except the bitter bellows that echoed through the walls. His situation was a glowing trap, battling a force that he could not defeat as the tissues of his brain were not strong enough to keep its troubling presence from worming through. A set of ingrained code instigating the opposing actions ran his life in their intricate arrangements of ones and zeros. They were nothing but a set of commands manipulating the pixels, allowing them to be picked up by the retinas, into the brain, grow the worm. Doing their proper job.
A few months into my stay, I experienced closer screams. These came from my roommate, an engineering student with not much to do but work. Unlike the upstairs man, they varied in mood, purpose, and delivery. The most common screams were the greeting screams. A high, joyful cry, greeting her caged rats in the living room. This happened about every day, seven days a week, like a loud, but happy set of noises a mother may give to their baby. Then came the angrier screams. Something being thrown, or loud vocalizations followed. Her enraged remarks undulated from her thudding into her room or circling through the entire unit.
These events would happen during the day at sporadic times and weren't as predictable as the upstairs man, though I had better context of their reasons. The screams were responses to the small furry bodies, skittering in the wood clippings and running along the squeaky hamster wheels. They were angered replies from deadbeat relatives, parents, and extensive reports. Telephone signals transferred through towers, though small speakers, and into the inner ear. And much like the upstairs man, they were rants coming from the source of arranged pixels on a screen.
It was a month ago when I saw a roach rush into the house. The creature slipped into the doorframe so seamlessly that I almost admired its dexterity. As much as people don't like to admit it, roaches are creatures of survival. Their hard shells remain unscathed from the whack of a broom and need the full weight of a shoe in order to be defeated. A roach body shape is flat. They slip into thin spaces like pieces of paper in a filing cabinet. One must not forget the craftiness of the roach, they know when to run, how fast to run, and where to escape. Millions of years of evolution to defend and hide. This makes roaches a tough fight when humans make opponents of them. They are the enemy that divides in silence.
When I came across the roaches during my cleaning, they seemed like foreign invaders. Filth of the neglected apartment running amok into my tidy sanctuary of a room. I couldn't unsee the outside vitriol emanating in their bodies. Pushing their repulsive energy into my peaceful space. Digging the angered man's shouts and roommates screams into the once clean corners of my walls. That's when I snapped. I made war on the insects, stomping them into a thick paste. Eons of evolution reduced to a sludge. Through this I reveled in a sense of victory I knew was false. There were many more, hiding, eating, and living. In their minds being no bother. They would always return. No apologies. Just a drive to live and exist.
My soul had become eaten. There was nothing but a cocktail of rage boring into my skull. I had entered the cycle. Fighting an enemy that I choose to exist. There was no end to the game, only an awareness of its systemic parts that had no obligation to enrage or please me. Nothing could be done but sit back and see it work in its mysterious ways.