The Fear.

I went into the bathroom to; you know, shit, at like eleven thirty at night last night. For some reason all of the toilet seats were down, so I lifted up the first one and sit down on the one that you are meant to sit on. I sit down without checking the inside of the toilet, I mean I am a much more grown up person than I was ten years ago when every time I sat on the toilet I had to check for toilet monsters first. There is of course that childhood fear that started, yeah probably again, like ten years ago, and this is one of those fears that come and go, like it is never on the top of my mind, but whenever I see them I just remember the thing that happened so long ago that will forever keep me scared of them... and that is when I saw an earwig crawl from under my bathroom sink and make its way under the bathroom bin.

I remember a time long ago when I was playing at lunch time in campus two at Unley Primary School. I wouldn’t have been any older than seven years old, and the thing to do wasn’t Poke’Mon, no not yet, for the season was bug catching season, and all we wanted to do was catch caterpillars in the school garden and bring them back into the classroom and put them in the caterpillar tank which we actually had for some reason. I had an ice cream container than I was putting all my caterpillars in; I probably had like, thirty caterpillars in the single container so I was actually dominating beyond belief. I got further into the schools garden and then I found this bug crawling around that I had never seen before. It looked like a long ant, but on the end of the long ants tail was like this pincer thing. I picked it up from its pincer and it didn’t bite me or anything, but I didn’t want to put it in with the caterpillars because it might kill them or something, who knows? I ended up putting the earwig in my left shirt pocket for safe keeping so at the end of lunch I could go into class and ask what kind of bug it was.

Before I could take a few steps in my desired direction, I felt a throbbing pain in my left nipple that I have never felt before. It hurt like an absolute motherfucker but being the retarded seven year old that I was, I didn’t think it was the earwig that I stupidly put in my left breast pocket, or shirt pocket or whatever it is called. I kept walking before I felt it again, but this time I felt the actual grip it had on my nipple, my poor seven year old hard nipple. I pulled it out of my pocket and threw it away, it bit my finger this time before it let go and went into the garden. I looked down my shirt to see that my left nipple was much, much redder than my right nipple. Not only that, but my nipple was actually bleeding a little bit.

For around a week after that, my nipple was swollen and in immense pain, now if that isn’t enough trauma to warrant a life time fear of earwigs then I don’t know what is. It is that kind of thing that I will never forget, a memory that will be forever embedded into my memory, much like when I sliced my leg open in reception, but that is a story for another blog. Anyway, back to me shitting with the earwig just in front of me, hiding behind the bin. So I did my shit, did my wipe and got up to wash my hands. I looked to the left to see the earwig hiding under the bin, so I lift up the bin and move it over a metre away from where it previously was, leaving the earwig with no cover; no place to hide. It scurries over to the corner of the room, less hiding and more playing it safe. It knows that it couldn’t be attacked from behind this way so the only place it could get attacked from was in front of it, and that is where I was; it was ready for me.

As I look at the earwig in the corner, I think to myself that if I killed it, I would be no better than that earwig that clamped my nipple all those years ago, I thought to myself that I should just let the earwig go, let it be. Then I thought to myself ‘fuck that’ and I rammed the bin into the corner of the room. Unfortunately for me, the bin had rounded edges, but the bathroom didn’t, and the bin did nothing but probably make the earwig shit itself, but it didn’t smush it like I had intended. This is when I actually thought that, I should just let it go. Then I went back into my room, went back on Facebook and realised that I had gotten over my fear of earwigs, I am better than them. At least I thought that until I went on Google Images to find a picture of an earwig for this blog and then I thought that, they are fucking scary as... I really should have killed that fucking thing, god knows where it is now... fuck.