Outwit. Outsmart. Outplay. A bug?

What a long night. I am exhausted. I spent the majority of the night trying to outwit a centipede that I never actually saw. Even though I never saw another centipede, I know that they are there. Somewhere. Lurking in the walls or maybe in some dark corner of a closet. If there is one, there is always more. There is never just one…ever. Yesterday I googled centipedes for hours…literally. I am not alone. A ton of people have this very same problem. There is misery in the numbers. I should start a centipede support group.

As soon as I got home I decided to get rid of the crap in the vacuum’s canister. I plugged in the vacuum to get it ready incase I needed to turn it on quickly if the centipede should somehow still be alive and attempt to escape. I stepped on the toilet paper and pulled the tube back. I wasn’t about to pull it out with my hand. There was no way I was going to let the centipede pull a sneak attack and run up my arm. I am a lot smarter than that…trust me. While I was prepared, it was ultimately not needed. It must have been dead since it did not crawl out at me. So I popped off the canister and headed out to the dumpster. As I was about to dump it into the dumpster I thought I need to make sure it’s really dead. Yes, I have seen one too many soap operas involving staged and faked deaths. Unless I see the remains, I don’t really believe something is dead. So I grabbed a twig and picked through the dirt in the canister. I didn’t see the centipede. Surely it would have been crushed by the suction of the vacuum, right? It was probably annihilated by the power of it. But, what if it survived? What if it had escaped in the dark of night? What if it was in some dark crevice plotting my demise. What if? There was no way to be certain. There was no way for me to put my mind at rest. I’ll never really know for sure. I’ll probably go to my grave wondering about it.

I didn’t want to go to sleep. I’ll be honest. I was more than a little freaked out. It’s ridiculous that a bug could throw me into such a tailspin…but it has.

So for the majority of the night I would go into my bedroom and quick flip on the light and dart around looking for anything moving. I would also use this tactic in the bathroom. A few times I did yell out “A HA!” without even thinking about it. I don’t think centipedes can hear, but better safe than sorry. I figured that sooner or later the centipede would return to the scene of the crime. All night long…over and over and over and over I tried my ambush attack. Despite my best efforts to have the upper hand by the element of surprise, it was all in vain. Finally at 2 AM I decided to try to go to bed. But, honestly I knew I would not get much sleep. I figured I would toss and turn in bed all night thinking I was feeling one in my bed or thinking that I could hear it crawling on my wall or even hear it whispering to me “I’m going to kill you.”. The centipede never returned as far as I know,

I think I might just take some sleeping pills tonight and knock myself out. I need to get some sleep somehow. Self medicating might be the only way to do it.

Who would have ever thought that trying to outsmart a centipede would be so difficult?