Day 8.

At 7:30 this morning, after doing a cursory check of the kitchen and finding it clear, I spotted a roach crawling across our dining room floor. He was aimed towards the utility room–probably heading for the the dog’s water bowl. I’m told the poison makes them very thirsty. Pitiful, really. Standing there in my robe, I had a vision of the linoleum floor as a desert, and the roach as a skinny man in ragged clothing, dragging himself across it towards a distant oasis…

I killed him with Mike’s Birkenstock.

The thing about it is, they’re spreading. This is the first non-kitchen sighting, and it’s profoundly disturbing. I’m trying not to call David over it, but it’s hard–after all, entire new avenues of therapeutic possibilities will be opened up if we start finding the bastards in other rooms.

And it’s difficult to talk to anyone else about this stuff. People fall into two camps: they’ve either never had roaches, and look at you suspiciously when they hear about yours, or they have, and are sympathetic, but seem mostly interested in regaling you with tales of the horrors they’ve endured:

“I used to live in a place on the lower East side,” one guy said kindly, as if offering solace, “where the roaches were so bad they’d crawl along the ceiling and fall into your bed in the middle of the night.”

“We had them too.” a different friend chimed in. “I used to turn out all the lights and wait in the kitchen with a can of Raid. When I heard them clicking I’d turn on the lights and gas em!”

“You should see the ones in the South,” said yet another. “They’re eight inches long. They fly at you, and bite. You can only kill them in the microwave.”

Stories like these, while meant to be encouraging, just give more fodder to my obsession. I hear a clicking sound: Is it Mina’s claws on the floor, or an army of roach reinforcements? I lie in my bed staring at the ceiling. Each crack becomes a potential attacker. I see something fly through the air; it is one of MJ’s toys, but I scream, thinking it’s a Bionic roach, come to avenge his friends.

So I’m a wreck. And now we’ve got roaches in the dining room!

I’m taking it a day at a time. A minute. A second. If I can just get to tomorrow I will allow myself one David call, and then try to get through the weekend.

We all need something to cling to.