Earning Sleep

Usually, I don't mind a housefly. In the summer, when they are most prevalent, they are only a minor annoyance; A bother done away with by waving a hand, as if I had all the power of a king. But as I sat up in my bed, my neck supported by an awkwardly folded pillow, the fly that buzzed around my room captured the bulk of my attention with its performance. It was the quiet and solitude that the fly had broken. I'm sure countless insects and spiders had successfully crept in and thwarted my pure loneliness in the past, but they had done so with subtlety enough to keep the Giant unstirred and blissfully ignorant of his guests. I must admit that the thought that it is so hard to escape the world of life and survival perturbs me to some degree. There is always something not far off that would see your end to further their's.

The concentration of my read would not be broken by a passive stalker, but the buzzing fiend that left haphazard and imaginary dash-marks in its wake as it flew about the unstirred air of my room. The volume of its unattractive buzzing was directly linked to the distance it kept from me. If this distance was halved, the sound was doubled. Such a change was easily noticed in my self-induced, yet somewhat broken meditative state. Soon after becoming aware of this unwanted cad of an insect, it became the second party in the room, thereby ruining my linear thought process.

The linear thought process is the one thing that I absolutely must maintain to achieve any meaningful level of cognitive retention of reading materials. I blame the fragility of this process to all those damn video games I played as a kid. It's when my linear thought is disrupted that I end up writing something, the subject of which can usually be found at the branching of my thoughts and is rarely interesting to anyone but myself (though this particular digression is of distinctively fuzzy and faint importance, even compared with houseflies).

After a series of paths taken by the fly, many of which brought it to every cardinal direction in relation to myself, its buzzing faded. My composure rocked, I began expecting to hear the sound again. So expectant was I that the soft hum of electricity within the house started sounding incredibly insectish. I feared that the fly was just waiting for the right time to play a trick on me; To ambush me and crawl under my skin to lay its eggs, or maybe jump up and spit in my eye. The fear had hatched ugly, writhing maggots, intent on foiling any line of productive or useful thought.

At a picnic, set upon by a gang of flies, I would have no problem hearing the cry of the warrior. I'd brandish my long, plastic, flatish blade with which to bring an untimely and gruesome death to the outmatched and miniscule monsters plaguing our plates of potatoes and ham. But the idea of an army makes sense. Some would even sell the idea as noble. A lone wanderer however; A "Jack the Ripper" of the bug kingdom could certainly haunt my read as ignobly as anything under the sun.

I reached with quiet trepidation for the entomology textbook, which the fates had placed so conveniently near to my side, hoping to procure from it some advantageous nugget of knowledge regarding my enemy. The common housefly (Musca domestica) only lives for an average of two weeks as a fly. Attrition was the obvious answer. I could be certain, with all the confidence that science could bestow, that the beast would be dead within this relatively short period of time. There was no doubt in my mind that the fat reserves I had built up within the past few years at college, coupled with the pallet of Ice Mountain bottled water I had "temporarily" placed near my bed only four hours earlier would sustain me during this deadly chess match.

It was harder than I thought to wait out the fly. My checkmate would come after roughly fourteen days of motionless thought and appreciation for my adversary. I received bed sores and came down with minor scurvy due to the lack of Vitamin C. But reading in peace, and greeting slumber with certainty has never felt so good.