Restless Nights

An excerpt from my diary last week. Since, I have been armed with a new fan, raid and more bug spray. My hands are like lightning and I am constantly on mosquito watch. Dengue is a serious issues here, and it is caused by mosquitoes. If I were to get it, it would knock out all my remaining time. Lets hope for the best

I get, on average, no more than four to five hours of sleep in this hell trap of heat and relentless bugs. It is 2am, and I sit alert with my enemy across the table, the two of us waiting for the other to fall asleep. I know i will not fall asleep tonight. I switch from couch to couch, bed to bed and the hell of my disquiet continues to be relentless. The four hours my body steals from my consciousness is just enough to keep my face from melting off. And coffee. I wonder again at the prupose of your tiny existences. Soley to bug me? To test my character? I remember that you will bury me, but at least allow me these moments to rest!

I long for my bed at home, cool and refreshing-my dark blue comforter falls over me in waves of satisfation. I need it now like I need a man-everything else is just surviving without its presence. I am nostalgic for the time when an occasional spider bite was an event that occured once a week. And even that was an issue. Imagine now, a place whre food left out is englufed by a swarm of hundreds of ants-hungry and vulgar-desperate to consume your meager daily portion. Like the person wqho rushes past you to get the seat on the bus, they got their first, what can you say-next time.

I remember I once saw a documentary that left me itchy and disturbed. It was about the insects, tiny and benign, that live in your clothes, on your skin and inside your body. I hate them. I know mom, you dont like when i say hate-but I have a genuine distaste for these tiny monsters who take pleasure in leaving scars all over my once scarless legs. Pleasure on vicously feeding on my flesh while Im still living. Thank God they only itch. I can feel them thinking and wanting more. When I watch them eat my food, out of curiousity for the grotesque, I swear they are watching me watch them. They are too many to not have a consciousness. An organized body of ants carries its dead in a most magnificent funeral procession.

I cant sleep. Maybe its only right that I cant sleep. How ignorant Ive always been of the fact they are my coinhabitants-as desperate to survive as I. Is this some gret irony? That they pick off of me in the same sens that I, in all my bourgeois glor, feed off the riches of the world and benefit from the people under me? the expression should go: mosquitoes, the great equalizer.

It makes me sad to think of infants, comforatble in their warm and cozy wombs, are shot out into a world where flies can eat their faces. And there skin becomes accustomed to the bites of tiny vicious things. As I think this, an infant yawns with indifference as an innocent fly curiously buzzes around. The bugs are quietly exploring our crevices, and testing my patience. I yawn and remember the part about the worms lining our digestive track. The early bird wasnt early enough.