How I Had a Panic Attack for Real This Time

Last night, my life flashed before my eyes. Lit'rally.

If you know anything about me, you probably know that I have a completely rational fear of spiders. Our old house was completely infested and it was my worst nightmare. Luckily, where I live now isn't nearly as bad - not even close, despite the fact that we live on the side of a mountain, which "apparently", as the supers at work tell me, is crawling with tarantulas. I think they're just messing with me, because I have yet to see one. Or maybe the peace offerings I leave for the tarantulas are actually working, and we maintain a civil ignorance of eachother.

Either way, I haven't seen many spiders in the house. If I do, I simply scream and run out of the room, slamming the door behind me, as per usual. But for the last three sightings, I've actually sucked it up and KILLED the spiders; usually bludgeoning them into the carpet with a baseball bat or beating them into an indiscernable pulp on the wall with my shoe, screaming all the while.

The spiders still disgust me, they still make me gag a little, they still make me pee a little from fright, but at least I'd gotten to the point where I could kill them myself.

But something happened last night that completely undid me. I was unloading $70 worth of Bath & Body Works product (thankyouverymuch, Semi-Annual Sale) and when I moved the bag, I found this resting on my bed:
It was the biggest, grossest spider I've ever seen in the house, and it was On. My. Bed. The next few minutes happened in slow motion as I tried to sort out my thought process.

First, I screamed bloody hell. Then I assessed the situation. In those precious seconds, here's what I realized: I was home alone, I was sans Huge Bald Guy or other large male, and I had to act quickly before the beast scuttled out of sight. If that had happened, rest assured, I would not be sleeping in my bedroom for a long time.

There was no way I was going to hit it with the baseball bat and smush the pulpy carcass into my $300 bedspread. I also had the fear that the spider was so big that it wouldn't die even if I hti it with the baseball bat (yes, this thought seemed rational).

Quickly, options raced through my mind. Call my brother? No time - it could run away by the time he got there. Smash it with the bat? And risk staining my beloved bedspread - not just no, but hell no. Trap it under a bowl? I didn't want to let it out of my sight, and it could chew through the bedspread if it was under the bowl for a long time (again, this thought seemed rational). My only other choice was to start crying, and grab the vacuum cleaner hose extension.

Fast forward ten minutes, when I made the following phone call to my roommate Ylime:

Bone Junior: (Trying to sound extremely bright and happy) Hi!! (sniff sniff) Um, are you coming home soon?

Ylime: Are you okay? You don't sound very good...

Bone Junior: Um, yeah, I'm okay. I know how silly this is going to sound, its just that (starts crying audibly) I came home and there was this huge spider on my bed, and I didn't know what to do and it was the biggest one I've ever seen in real life, and it just really freaked me out and no one was home and I was all alone, and there was no one I could call to come kill it for me and I couldn't even get near it! I was shaking and sweating and I finally sucked it up in the vacuum hose, and then I saw that it was still alive in the tank! It was crawling back up the sides of the tank, Em!! It was still alive in there!! And it really shook me up because I always suck spiders up into the vacuum and I thought they died when you did that; I truly believed that they died, I clung to that hope, but its still alive! I was sitting there, yelling at the spider, 'Why won't you just DIE!!' and smacking the side of the tank, and it would fall into the debris and just start crawling up again! And so now its trapped in the vacuum, but I can't leave the vacuum in the house, Em, I just can't, because I'll be thinking about how its crawling back into the hose and it will make a web in there and lay eggs and then baby spiders will get all over me next time I use the vacuum, and I just can't kill it, so do you think your brother could come over and empty the tank for me??

(Takes a deep breath to attempt composure) I know how pathetic this sounds; I mean, I'm twenty-five years old (starts sobbing) I'm all alone, Em! I saw the spider and I screamed, and there was no one to help me. I have no one to kill my spiders and I just felt so alone. There was no guy around to help me and I was just sitting there, crying and thinking about how McBicep is two-thousand miles away and I miss him, and my sister is three-thousand miles away and I miss her, and I miss Baby Owen, and I miss my dog, and everyone is on vacation, and I'm all alone out here, and I don't have a guy to help me fix things or kill the bugs for me, and how am I ever going to be able to kill spiders by myself? I'm going to die alone and no one will ever be there to help me kill spiders...."

Ylime assured me that her brother would come over and empty the tank and that I was not going to die alone. She also told me that I wasn't crazy; that I was probably just PMSsing and I'd look back and laugh about this later.

Sometimes a girl just needs to hear that she's not crazy, no matter how crazy she sounds.