collegiate diversion

 I play my electric~88 and dust collects at my fingertips. What does that say for my motivation?

There are these flies that buzz outside my window. I know winter is apparently here in Ithaca but sometimes the fresh air helps me wake up in the mornings. And then these giant buzzing and awfully disturbing insects find a way into my room.

It was early in the morning, and I was of course, late for class. So I pulled on my boots and ignored the conundrum: a buzzing intruder and no hole in my screen.

I came back to my one~room home at 11 in the evening, one day of interview chasing, caffeine dropping rushing and pumping grossness. I hit the mattress harder than usual for it just being myself.

Buzzzz, bizzzz, bzzzzzz.

The paper lantern hanging room my ceiling, I like looking at it when I’m like this ~ exhausted and mesmerized by the orange glowing hue. Candlelight from this hanging contraption I made to block out the fluorescence. You think for an intellectual institution they’d know these inane lights suck the life through my eye sockets.

Sorry, bitter. More than usual I guess.

Then there was this flicking, like tiny and harsh and utterly repugnant wings bumping into paper. Son of a bitch. That fly was still doing it. I rolled the day’s newspaper into an authentic fly swatter and sought to end this bug’s life.

Sorry, bitter. Is it karma that will get me for this?

Swat, swat. I chased it around my room. Then, like a Homo Sapien Neanderthal searching out it’s pray, I learned from my foolish mistakes and got smart. Turn off all the lights, except for one, the bright bed lamp above my pillows. Now, I had cornered my intruder.

Swat, swat, whack. You were dead my fiendish friend.

Sorry, creepy? It’s just an average house fly, or is it horse fly? Regardless, they frighten me! I read in second grade, imagine me, cute innocent girl in pink floral dress picked for~her~by~her mother, this: everytime a fly land’s, it vomits it’s last meal and eats again.

EWWWWW! I mean, my god. Who could go to a picnic after that? I tell you, I still can’t.

But it was dead. Gone. I knew it had brothers but I’d learn, cunning Homo Sapien. I forget what it’s called hen you grow like that from experience but I had. I will never open my window again.

Because I’ve seen them, all hundreds of flying despicable entities who do the thing I so wish to do: just fly! Every morning I had looked out the thirteenth floor, where there should be no bugs, and seen them, gathering. Around the rottenness. Four or five every day. Where are they coming from? Why are they coming here?

My piano is collecting dust, I thought I played it so often that it just cleaned itself. We are symbiotic like that, piano and me. And this banana on my desk had rotted so much, it stuck to my notes from History.

Am I so clueless as my own entity, my only living partner, that I attract the flies in my rot?

Bzzzz, buzzzz, zzzzzz.

And oh my God, the thing had come back to life. I had swatted, I had hunted, I had killed, and I had watchedit’s lifeless body fall limp behind my bed frame. Twenty minutes of quite contemplation it had regenerated and resurrected itself.

What?! How did that happen? How can a tiny bug do that, even with the force of my hand, and my crafty newspaper?!

I freaked out. I’ll admit it. And I killed it and until it’s black smear stained my bed. Right, like that’s better.

I thought of the person who swallowed that fly. I tell you, I’m not going to swallow this. I couldn’t stomach it.

Guess I’ll have to do a wash.