Figured after three weeks of repeated disaster I was long-due for something like this. I mean, earthquakes and tsunamis are special events: the sort of events that you can look back upon and tell your kids you survived with pride in your eyes and faint trauma scars across the back of your mind, the kind that makes you assume any unanticipated motion (truck on the road, someone shaking the bed, the background operation of your own body) is another quake on its way. Not everyone gets to live through that.
I was very special.
This day actually starts last night. This will not be an entirely normal update because it was not an entirely normal night, and it cascaded into a morning that deceived in its cheeriness and general good will towards mankind.
You won't be finding these disasters on the news. They are entirely mundane.
I present to you my masterwork from last night, written in the bathroom (of which I am now more than a passing acquaintance) under the influence of frustration, fear, and exhaustion. The time was 5:20 am. The following words are unedited.
"Can't sleep. When I sleep I'm defenseless. When I sleep they come for me, and they come for me even as I try. They're everywhere-- everywhere flitting shapes bloodsuckers buzzing wings in my ears-- I can't escape. I'm in the bathroom door shut window shut watching... they'll get me here, too, eventually.
They only come for me. Twenty bites in two days, all along one arm. Elbow. Wrist. Fingers. Forehead neck shoulders they're eating me alive and I can't do anything about it I'm slathered in chemicals and hiding beneath sheets and still they come they come they come
I startle at the least motion. Least sound. Hypersensitive waiting for the whine in my right ear-- always my right ear.
No internet. I wanted to talk to someone. Look into purchasing a mosquito net burning candles something anything but there's no internet and everyone's asleep.
Somewhere along the way I took a wrong turn: this isn't Chile, this is Hell.
Silly, sure. Overreacting, sure. Cowering in the bathroom writing for lack of contact at 5 am.
But there aren't any in here. I think. Yet.
Letting insects dictate my life. Sleep. Don't sleep. Where, when, how-- open to the air or hiding beneath cloying sheets hoping this time it will work. They've driven me out of my room out of my bed fleeing with my pillow like a child crying.
Silly.
Stupid.
But I can't sleep. I can't do it. I can't I can't I can't.
Why must the internet fail at night when I need it most, not for something meandering and useless but for survival. Every night it goes down. This night.
I look over my shoulders, waiting. Wonder if the prickling of my legs is cold or them and don't want to check.
It's fine, they said. Just mosquitoes. No fleas in this house, just mosquitoes. Here: buy some of this repellant. It's good. It'll work.
It didn't.
It's toxic and I ate some of it during dinner, smeared on my fingers left over, and it doesn't work.
Bites on my hands, my fingers, my neck, my shoulders my forearms and elbows... I covered them with chemicals and yet suffer check my skin for more pulpy patches of dark red surrounded by rings of itchy pink.
Only annoying, right? Just itchy. No diseases, no West Nile or malaria.
But they're everywhere. And they're eating me. And I can't sleep.
In the morning I play it down-- yeah, I'm from a state with no mosquitoes, this is all new to me, it itches but its not that bad....
Night is a siege.
Stupid, stupid. What else to do? There are machines that spray Raid into the rooms while you sleep, making them slower and easier to kill, but do I want to breathe poison for a year in exchange for slower terrors?
Net. I want a net. I want veils of shrouding white around my bed, a wall, a fortress to match my paranoia, a Lace Curtain through which none shall pass. Good God, do I want a net. I am a silly weak foreigner in a foreign land and people might laugh-- look at the gringa, can't handle a few bugs-- but I would be safe.
I would be able to sleep. Five days I haven't slept. Not really. Make do with four-hour naps during the day when they aren't awake and hungry and buzzing. Five hours, maybe, if I'm lucky.
Letting bugs scare me away from what is mine but here I am with my pillow in the bathroom typing.
I want to go home.
Earthquake, tsunami, abject poverty, entirely too much bread... this I can handle. I can ignore tremors in the night, picture frames shaking, CD cases clattering in their cabinet. Disaster is a way of life. It happens.
Despair is a keening in your ear and the knowledge that they're waiting.
There are no mosquitoes at home.
Lucky, they said.
Yes.
Very.
Why did I leave?"
The next morning (this morning) I informed Myriam of my plight over breakfast. Rather more calmly, I might add, having had time to compose myself after fleeing weeping to the water closet three hours before.
Results: my room now smells faintly of Raid and I nearly fumigated myself trying to drop my bag off inside after signing up for classes at the college. Also, there are now two thin poles duct-taped to the back of the headboard, over which is laid a great deal of white filmy fabric. My fortress raised at last. Hallelujah.
After my time at the college signing up for classes, I returned to discover a new fellow in the house, a fellow whose name I sadly cannot remember at the moment for lack of much contact. He's tall enough, we joked over dinner, to paint the roof with his hair and thin as an anemic coyote. Bearded. Seems nice, but like I said I didn't see much of him: he immediately retired to his room to unpack and afterwards fled to the college to choose his own classes before the weekend rush.
By this point I wasn't feeling well-- tired, stomachache, and I spent most of the day asleep. Brief dinner (tea and nothing else for me) at nine, and then more attempted sleep. What was curious about this attempt was that the upset in my midregions induced a very specific and peculiar hallucination whenever I closed my eyes: some sort of religious ceremony, presided over by people in cloaks, involving cups and and a big table and a lady beside me who'd pat my shoulder every so often and inform me that whatever it was they were doing was extremely significant and I should pay attention.
I wondered if pain-induced fever dreams was how religion came to be.
Then I returned to the bathroom and threw up.
I'm feeling marginally better now.
On a positive note, I do have my classes:
1. Español Comunicacional y Cultura Chilena (6 créditos)
2. Fisica y Humor (2 créditos)
3. Arte y Sociedad en Chile Prehispánicos (3 créditos)
4. Introducción a Geografía (4 créditos)
5. Taller de America: Espacio Urbano (2 créditos)
6. Lenguaje, Cognición, y Sociedad (3 créditos)
7. El Universo (2 créditos)
8. Antropología General (3 créditos)
For my esteemed readers who do not know Spanish, these translate as:
1. Communicational Spanish and Chilean Culture
2. Physics and Humor
3. Art and Society in Prehispanic Chile
4. Introduction to Geography
5. Workshop of America: Urban Space
6. Language, Cognition, and Society
7. The Universe
8. General Anthropology
All will be going to U of I as Spanish credit, regardless of actual topic-- and 400-level Spanish credit in all cases but two, at that. Figured I'd just take whatever looked interesting and pick and choose the classes that I end up liking the most.
School starts Monday.
A sidenote:
While boarding the bus back home from the University, the driver asked me if I was French. I suspect it was the orange headscarf that threw him off-track (orange headscarves are not part of the stereotypical "American" ensemble) and suggested as much to Maria-José. She told me, quite definitively, he probably made the mistake because bus drivers are not very high-class people.
Hmmm...
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