For the past three nights I have woken up with mosquito bites on my face--my cheek, my forehead, and finally, my eyelid. Last night it came to a head though, as that mosquito woke me up at 4 in the morning with her whirring wings as she aimed for bite #4. As I lay waiting for her, hoping in vain that I would be able to swat her out of the air while quickly ducking under the covers, I wondered about her life that she had established here at 4 rue paul Bagnol with Cedric and I. Of course, I felt closer to her than Cedric because he managed to avoid her bites, so in some say, she and I were BFF, soul sisters. I wondered where she would go to lay her eggs. Knowing that mosquitos generally lay their eggs near water, I considered the toilet, the shower drain but decided that she probably went back outdoors. I was still pretty sure though that it was the SAME mosquito visiting me every night, like a stray dog, she had picked me for her blood meals that would so carefully nurture her young. One day, I found her in the refrigerator. Bizarrely, she was laying in the door next to the milk, certain death for a cold-blooded creature. I picked her out and proudly proclaimed to Cedric, I caught her! It's finally over! He was not moved by this moment and was even less impressed when she promptly flew out from my fingers, leaving behind one of her 6 thin legs. It was that very night that she haunted me, buzzing in my ear, was she angry at me? Doing it on purpose to wake me? Or did I just know subconsciously when I went to sleep that night that she was out there?
I finally made it to sleep again and awoke without any fresh red marks on my face. Then this afternoon, as I was shifting the hangers in my closet, I spotted her as she flew onto the back wall. So this was where she spent her day. Soaking in my smell, no doubt, the smell of CO2 and stinky feet that she and her kind love so much about us humans. I paused a moment before swatting her to think this. I was also considering whether I should go get a tissue to kill her. I decided to do it with my bare hands. That's the kind of battle this had been between she and I--mano-a- mano. It was surprisingly easy to kill her, she didn't move away. For a second, I really did think that she had given up and allowed herself to be caught. I noticed that her belly was not distended, the way it looks when a mosquito has recently taken a blood meal. I crushed her abdomen and found just a sticky red liquid, maybe the blood meal she had taken from my eyelid the day before. Either way, it was over. I kind of hoped that she had gotten an egg laying out of the deal. I don't know why, since I understand the destruction and despair that her sisters cause all over the world, to the poorest of countries. And personally, I thought I would go crazy if I couldn't get back to sleep with her constant patrolling around my face all night. Still, she was kind of cute, how she had taken to me, that little anthropogenic mosquito, now making her final final resting place in my kitchen garbage can.
