I was driving home from work. It's rush hour, so it's pretty slow, stop and go, and I'm trying to turn left onto this major road. I'm waiting, waiting, waiting for the light to turn green, when I see something moving out of the corner of my eye. I look over and see something white squirming around where the dashboard meets the windshield. And I'm not talking like pure, clean white, I'm talking like deathly sick, nauseated person white, pale green horse of the apocalypse light, ghostly, evilly white. The car in front of me moves up, though the light is not yet green. "Ok," I say outloud, "I can deal with bugs. I'm fine, as long as he stays right over there." So, of course, as soon as I say that, it starts crawling over in my general direction, still staying by the windshield, but definitely in my direction.
Just for the record, I'm normally ok with bugs, including spiders. They can stay in their part of the room, and I'll stay in mine. I do have issues when they don't stay out of my space, but that's another matter. However, the problem in the car was not only that I had no ability to move away from the spider, but I also could not be paying it much attention, because I needed to be watching the road, especially since traffic was patchy, and the road had a high speed limit.
Still waiting for the light to turn green, I watch the intruder's progress with increasing panic. It got close enough that I was able to definitely identify it as a spider, and recognize that it was about the size of my thumb nail. While this is by no means a huge spider (thank Heaven), it definitely would have been squishy if it had been crushed, which would be gross. Bleh.
I kept one eye on the road, as traffic had started moving again. Somehow, I managed to round the left hand turn with more grace and skill than I think I ever had before (this one is a bit tricky, since it's a sharp-ish turn where two lanes go to three, and both lanes fight for the middle lane, despite the clear markings that the right lane is the one with that right and privilege). I laugh, trying to lighten the mood, and comment how maybe this situation which has me scared out of my mind might not be so bad after all. The quiet menace has almost made it all the way across the dashboard, and it now angles its approach, bringing it not only closer from right to left, but also from front to back. I sit there, trapped and helpless, giving half an eye to the road and one and a half eyes to the spider. I know better than to drive too fast while thus distracted, which may have saved my life, because the spider got ever closer, until it got right over the spot between the steering wheel and my shallowly-breathing body, and dropped.
There are occasions where I don't quite know what to believe. Photoshop and exaggeration both cause one to cast a critical eye over anything that seems too out of the ordinary. When I read Eli's blog, for example, I constantly question exactly how much of his professed screaming and crying is real, and how much is added for dramatic effect. Don't be fooled. I screamed, and I screamed, and I screamed when that eight-legged terror dropped down level to my chin, and I slammed on the breaks. Thankfully, the light had turned red, so everyone was slowing down anyway.
Perhaps I'm exaggerating with the whole "I could have died thing," since there was no specific occasion where some underlying car-driving instinct saved me from an untimely death and/or maiming, but there very easily could have been such an occasion. And I was frightened out of my mind.
At this point, I reached over and rolled down the window, and then tried to grab at a piece of paper from the passenger seat to scoop this demon spawn out of my car. I prefer the "live and let live" approach when it comes to bugs, especially spiders. The problems with this: I was driving, and I didn't actually want to touch this creature, but because it was a fast bugger, it would probably end up on me before I could shove my hand out the window.
It somehow dropped down again between my legs (between, thank Heaven), and I lost track of it. I hoped that would be the last I saw of it. Then, not one stoplight later, I look over to see it crawling up the left side of the car. When it reached the little air-vent fan thing, I rolled down the window and, screaming once or twice, grabbed a sheet of paper and attempted to shove the spider out of the window, in the process only causing it to drop down once more. In this moment, as I was driving very slowly and looking all around the floor, and yelling "Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh."
Then, I had a miniature epiphany. One of those moments where something you've been taught all your life really becomes real, and you realize the truth that was there all along. Science would refer to the subject of this particular discovery as "genetics." Oh, Science: humankind's meager attempt to explain away things that it doesn't understand. No, what was really going on here was the Mother's Curse. The Mother's Curse takes two forms: one, you are cursed with children who behave just like you did, and the other, you are cursed to have those mannerisms and/or behaviors that you made fun of in your mother. For me, it was the latter. I pity the mutant who has enough fingers and toes to count the number of times I have heard my mother scream and yell "Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh" exactly the way that I did in that moment, especially in response to a bug. (Actually, for you It Just Gets Stranger readers, the First Eye probably comes pretty close. And I pity him.) But, seriously, I was shaken out of my terror for a moment here to be incredibly shocked by the similarity, as well as appreciate it and ponder it.
This did not last too long. I frantically scoured the floor of the car, following for a brief second the movements of the spider, before it darted out of my sights and disappeared. I saw something on the floor that might have been it. At this point, something in me broke. This was a thoughtfully determined breaking, though, not a spontaneous sort of rupture. I knew that I physically could not put up with having this live spider in the car, and there was no way to get it out safely, so I went into spider-kill mode. Mind you, this something on the floor was not our spider friend (if by "friend" you mean enemy and nemesis), so it was alive in the car. And I could not see it anywhere.
I felt like Mr. Incredible when he sees some guy get mugged and his boss won't do anything about it.
"He got away."
Yes, this image is from the wrong part of the movie, but it's as close as I could get. You get the picture. (Pun intended!)
I spent the rest of the ride living in absolute fear of this embodiment of evil making a reappearance. This reminded me of the episode of Sherlock that I had seen the night before (clearly, there is very little in this world that can stop me from pondering the mysteries of the universe, and how they tie in with media that I have watched/read/taken in recently). Sherlock's and Watson's client had spent his whole life living in fear derived from a single moment. Twenty years of this guy's life had been spent in fear and torture, all because of a single experience. This experience never repeated itself, nor could it, really, but he remained traumatized by it. And I'm not condemning him at all for this, because it really was frightening (I mean, his dad did die). But it's just interesting how fear stays with us.
My fear certainly stayed with me as I drove home. This was manifest in my obsessive checking of the floor whenever the car came to a stop. I also found that anything that moved in the car, or that reflected light differently that its surroundings, or that touched my leg (such as my pants (Zobe translator: trousers) or my shoes) suddenly grew eight legs and started coming towards me (another Sherlock similarity...). I'm also ashamed to say that I stopped myself from singing along with Nana a few times, whispering to myself that if I sang, the spider would hear me, and he might come and get me (since, you know, other than that, I was untraceable).
I am eternally grateful that I have not seen this eight-legged fiend again. It was as much as I could do to get home safely just thinking about it, never mind if I had seen it again. But I did get home safely.
And that is my story about my terrifying, death-defying experience on my way home from work.
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