Love Bug

Published in “The Audacity” in Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writers Series

It is June, and the chocolate I have saved from Halloween is melting on the radiator. I am the age where you hide candy in your room because it is important to save. “Don’t tell anyone,” I say with a small finger to my lips. My friends and I make signs for the secret stash with our colored pencils: Keep out mom and dad. Hands OFF. Kids only! When the chocolates grow spots and the gumballs change color, it doesn’t matter to me. Sugar is something I tell lies for.

One morning before school, I go to take a bite out of the radiator chocolate. And after a few moments, my tongue stings. Not from sugar and not from satisfaction, but from pain. I wonder why the radiator is on in the summer and why, after a moment of waiting, the burning doesn’t stop. When I go to check my mouth in the mirror, I see movement. Ants. About twenty of them, biting my tongue and crawling around my teeth. I spit and run my tongue against an entire paper towel roll. Our dog goes running, and the ants scatter up the wall.

I surrender my stash after that. My mother tells me that after bugs live in a place, they never leave. I don’t know whether she is punishing me or herself when she says this. But I check my mouth for weeks to make sure they are all gone. I think about them in the roof of my mouth, digging into my gums, forming tunnel systems through my cheeks and behind my eyes. I am old enough now to understand that bugs don’t live inside me like this. But when I return home to visit my parents, I pay attention when I see an ant on my radiator. Or behind the bathroom mirror, or on the table. The little girl in me wonders if they are searching for something sweet. The adult in me now worries what happens if the bugs never go away.

Here is a scene: I am lying next to a girl. She is the first girl I lie next to since I’ve learned some girls aren’t just friends. She has tattoos down her arms. Drawings of album covers and movie scenes and ghosts. A carnation on her stomach. Two women on her thigh. I pay attention to how this girl likes to live boundless. She gives herself haircuts and has sleepovers with friends on Mondays. She tells me she wants to take naps inside my brain. We are 25, so we don’t hide candy anymore. I think we hide other things, but she tells me she doesn’t like sweets, anyways.

“What’s this tattoo?” I ask her. I kiss her arm in the way you search for new places to kiss the person you love. I then point to the drawing of a spider, with its web traveling down her arm.

“The spider’s name is Irving Zazouki,” she says. He is a character from stories her father used to tell her. Irving Zazouki travels the world in his Suzuki, every night. Paris, Prague, the desert. I tell her my father used to be a great story teller, too, but now he says he lost his vocabulary. I also tell her how my dad is beginning to pee himself, and I help take his pants off. But he used to be the best story teller, I say, before he lost his words. She says she is sorry. There is silence. She says she is sorry, she is falling asleep.

Here is another scene. My grandmother is 76 years old, and she is having trouble sleeping. She says the bugs are keeping her up at night. My mother flies down to Tennessee to check on her. The exterminator finds no bugs, and the doctor says everything looks normal. The next night, my grandmother lies awake again. “There are bugs everywhere,” my mother hears her cry.

I wonder what exactly it is about bugs that we are afraid of. When I was little, I would collect cicada carcases and glue them to construction paper. “I’m decorating,” I’d say, as I presented my art to my parents. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that bugs are something I now hold caution for. I talk about pest management and pay for exterminators. My roommates and I spray the bugs in our apartment and watch their bodies seethe. And even though we have the undeniable size advantage, I watch as they get on top of chairs until the roach in the kitchen is confirmed dead. “Did you get it?!” they scream, shutting their eyes as I go for the bug with a rolled up magazine. “I bet there are more,” they say, “hiding.” Perhaps it is an anticipatory fear we have. An adult fear. A fear of being attacked by what we can’t see.

Anticipatory fears are something my therapist names for me. “It is a feeling similar to what you would feel during loss,” she says. “But given your father’s timeline, it would make sense to feel that fear now, as well.” I watch her face on the Zoom call, and I understand it’s my turn to respond. 

“Ah,” I say, and pick my nail under the desk. “So I’ll feel this twice?”  I laugh. She is generous and joins me.

My father has Alzheimer’s, so we talk about the things he has lost before we lose him. He recently lost the word tissue. And banana. He calls them the “what’s it called,” and points. I think he is currently losing the word for me.

 “The other day he looked me right in the eye and said ‘did Annabelle go home?” I tell my therapist. “And I just watched him watch me, waiting for my answer.”

“You are preparing yourself, by feeling these emotions now,” my therapist says. Protecting yourself, really.” I pick another nail. This time I bleed.   

My first sleepover with the girl, she stays awake all night.  She tells me not to worry because she has insomnia and that I should go ahead and sleep. We joke about her being a vampire guarding the night. She stretches her arms above her head, and I marvel at the ease in which she can be so comfortable in the bed of a new person. I wake up intermittently to peek at her, her blonde hair messy and fingers flying playing basketball on her phone.  

One month later, we play hooky and take the Q train to the Coney Island Aquarium. I bring an envelope of questions along with me. They are for her to pick when she feels like being asked something. When I ask her to describe love in one word, she says “everything.”

At the end of the day, we go to a bar near the boardwalk. It is here that I tell her I love her for the first time. I stand on the bar stool and tell the entire bar, too. “She loves you back!” says a patron, “Look at that face!” It’s true. She did.

When my Father and I go to the planetarium a month later, I hold his hand and help him to his seat. It is dark, and he walks slow. During the show, I direct his attention upwards. “Look dad,” I say, “Do you see the stars?” When I check to see if he is watching, his eyes are closed.

After the show, I ask him what he thought. We link arms and I guide him up the steps. “It was good,” he says, watching the auditorium floor, “but it is raining in here.” He tells the people waiting on line the same thing. “Bring an umbrella,” he says.

I used to correct him in these moments. “It’s not raining Dad. You’re confused, we’re in a planetarium!” I’d say, ushering him away. But now I decide to let him be. Doesn’t everyone get to choose what they believe in?

***

It is summertime, and me and the girl have been in each other’s lives for three seasons. Our bodies are tanned, and our skin shows when we dress. We go to the cinema and talk through the movie. I drop notes at her office. We get drunk. I meet her mom. She kisses me at my dance recital, and our friends cheer.

She asks me if she can meet my family. Two trips back home and multiple meals with her mother has the scale tipped in her favor. It’s not that I didn’t want her to meet my parents. I hoped to feel comfortable enough to share that part of me with her eventually. But I didn’t understand her speed. A person of new friends, someone who extends invites and loves fast. I mistake her pace as a shortcoming of my own rhythm and do my best to chase her lead. My fears became flaws. Something to fix or ignore or excuse. I am slow to thaw, I would say. An identity I have adopted since dating her. The nervous one and the overthinker. The one who

Googles “what is trust?”

I continue to make the mistake of welcoming my discomfort as a challenge throughout our relationship. When she shares her bed with other girls and says they had nowhere else to go, I say okay. When her mother, drunk with her eyes crossed, tells me her daughter is a heartbreaker, I quiet my questions. And when we wake up with bites, we blame the spiders crawling in through the window. Irving Zazouki must have had some wild adventures last night! We laugh. I go home with welts on my legs. Souvenirs from a sleepless night. I call the bites hickies rather than a warning sign.

Bed bugs, I will learn, are hematophagous. This means blood is their only meal, ever. The bug spends most of its life in hiding, digesting, which makes them difficult to find. “Their bites come in threes,” the exterminator says, spraying the poison along my bedframe, “Breakfast lunch and dinner.” It is in the night, when we are sleeping and typically most still, that they feed. When we wake up, we are left with the remnants of their activity in our beds and on our bodies. “It’s gonna be okay, kid,” he says, handing me the bill. “See you in three weeks.”

The pest has been around for centuries. Ancient Romans believed the sighting of a bed bug meant that war was near. Some modern day Shamans believe that encountering bed bugs in our home symbolize our unwillingness to face thoughts that are unsavory to us. I feel as similarly about symbolism as I do about astrology. The options of what to believe are endless, so we take what serve our own stories. I wonder though, at what point does choosing what to ignore become dishonest?

At the end of the summer, I open Spotify on the girls laptop and see a new playlist she made. It’s titled “I can’t stop thinking about you.” Created five days ago. It is set to private, so the only person who can see it is who she shares it with. I click on the follower and it is another girl, whose profile photo is a pink sky. She has a new playlist too. “Me neither,” hers reads. Come October, I will learn, the two of them are dating.

“Are you cheating on me?” I ask, and it is in this moment that I feel grief for the girl who anticipates and isn’t proven wrong.

I read once that to sleep next to someone you trust can make you live longer. The oxytocin in our brains released from physical closeness can increase a sense of safety and belonging. My mother says she used to hear my body fly down the hall about the same time every night. My feet would patter along the floor and she knew it was time to make room. “You are breathing so fast, honey,” she said. I would tuck my feet between her knees and put my face so close my cheek touched hers. “I’m sorry,” I’d say.“I got scared.”

My father sleeps in a nursing home now, and when he roams the halls at night, he calls my mother’s name. The nurses watch him knock on doors and walk into residents’ rooms. “Suzanne?” He calls out. “Where are you?”

What happens when you no longer sleep next to the person you trust? Or what happens when you sleep next to somebody you don’t trust? How do you know the difference? And when do you begin to not trust yourself, too? After the exterminators are gone, and you have heat- treated your clothing and your mattress and your pillows, when do you believe that the bugs are gone? Are they ever? Can you sleep? I’m not sure.

Me and the girl don’t talk anymore. In the months after we broke up, I spent a lot of

time rehearsing what I would say if I saw her. Sometimes anger. Sometimes amends. On a good day, a thank you. I looked for her on subway cars and Manhattan streets. I imagined her showing up on my stoop. There to surprise me, tell me she missed me, ask for forgiveness. “I love you,” she would say, “What we had, it was real.” A promise.

I also spent a lot of time repairing. I walked home from parties. I went to the movies,  I called my mom. I said out loud what didn’t work between me and the girl. The signs were always there. But perhaps that is what happens when you lend your intuition to another. We abandon ourselves.

***

Now it is summertime again, a year later, and I watch the people in the park swat their faces while they jog. I see the New York City exterminators crossing the street wheeling their poison like it’s a suitcase. I think about how many apartments they visited that day. How many people, nervous and desperate, plead them with questions. “Are you sure they’re all gone?” I hear them say, with their mattresses turned over and clothing in bags. “What happens if they come back?”

I pass a bar near the girl’s house, and I think about a time we shared a table here. I remember sitting across from her, feeling beautiful, my hair curling with the weather, and hoping to be told so. It’s funny, I wish I could join myself at the table here. Escort the other girl out, and if she protested I would insist—“I can take it from here.”  

“What do you want to drink?” I would say, pulling up a chair. “Something sweet?” She would agree, telling me she’s always liked sugar. I would ask about her family or her goals or what she likes doing on Saturdays. She would share her stories, so bright and daring. And I would be sure to hold her face and tell her myself: “You are so beautiful.”