A Fly Is Dying In My Bedroom
A fly is dying in my bedroom.
An unusually warm New England winter means we’re dealing equally now with certain pests as we were in July and August. Namely, stink bugs and ladybugs. In the evenings I’ll often see two or three of those brown ugly things walking along the ceiling above my lamp or — god forbid — crawling across my laptop as I write. Sometimes they’re in the kitchen on a cabinet door handle, or one crawls across the TV while we watch a movie.
Though morning, day and night, I hear a fly buzzing around my windows.
I do not know how this fly got into my room. That’s a lie. This house was built in 1910, and there is a gap between my window-mounted AC unit and the windowframe where I think cold air and bugs get in. My dresser is underneath that window, and I once found about 16 stink bugs inside a shirt I had folded but left on top of the dresser for a week, at which point I thought about fumigating my closet and burning every item of clothing I owned.
I’m spending a lot of time in my room these days. Since leaving Missouri and moving back home to Connecticut to work on the job hunt, there’s been little to do other than apply. My remaining high school friends have all moved away, either out of the tri-state area or into New York City where most of my college friends ended up, and where I’m trying to end up. There is nobody I know in my hometown anymore, so I run, I go to the gym, I cook, and I sit at my desk and apply. For the past two weeks or so as I’ve done this, the fly has been here.
Here I have included an image of the fly with a visual aid.
I know the fly is dying because it moves to one of my four windows and goes pzzzzt against the glass with increasingly frenzied irregularity. I also know it is dying because this morning I found a dead fly on the ground by my floor lamp and thought I had finally been freed, only to hear more buzzing shortly after. I can only assume there is a steady supply chain of flies sentenced to death by the Fly Judiciary, and my room has been designated as their mass burial site.
The fly is my enemy. As I get into the groove of a cover letter or blog, like this one, it buzzes around and pulls me out of focus. Just as a show or video game lulls me into temporarily forgetting that I have a spreadsheet of probably hundreds of applications I’ve sent, it hits the window.
“Just kill the fly, you idiot,” I hear you say. I understand your frustration, but I must tell you that you’re only half right. I cannot kill the fly because it is always on the ceiling or the top of the window frame. I could grab a stool and a swatter and kill it, but by the time I assemble such things it will likely have buzzed off to another location. When I started this paragraph I could see it on the ceiling directly above my desk. By now it’s flown elsewhere in the room.
When looking around for a header image for this article, I googled the term “dead fly artwork” and found a horrifying gallery of dead flies placed on stick figure drawings to make them look like they’re doing something a person would do. The most horrifying thing about it is that the volume of such photos implies that this is indeed A Thing People Do.
The worst of them had two dead flies standing on a street corner together, pissing on the ground. Because I saw this, now you have to see it, too:
This is your reward for being among the few to make it this far in the article, since Medium tells me my average read ratio is about 72 percent. Though this article’s subject matter and thumbnail probably means even less than that will get this far.
This is the content others are missing out on. But not you. You’re smarter than them.
I don’t exactly know what I really intended this blog to be about. I’m frustrated and tired, and the fly is pissing me off. When I try to relax, it pulls me out of it. I tried to play off that, using the fly as a metaphor for a nagging anxiety that I can’t be free of even during leisure. That metaphor is pretty obvious, but I went for it anyway. But all this is a symptom of thinking about everything too much, all the time. The fly is a nagging reminder. But it’s also just a fucking fly, and it is annoying me. And one of us is dying in my bedroom.
