A Letter from the Front

I am, once again, being kept awake by bug bites.

A few weeks ago, the bugs were certainly mosquitoes, making that horrible noise as they swoop by my ears, the one that makes me (half-asleep) writhe in my bed trying to wriggle them away. Each time, after a slightly more conscious realization of their attempts (which always means that I’ve already been bitten), I tilt out of bed and across the room, train the fan on myself at full blast (see if they can fly in that! ha!), and pull my covers up to my chin. Despite these air and land defenses, the sea remains an open front, as I never find the standing water they thrive on, and getting rid of it is the only sure way of getting rid of them.

After each nighttime battle, I resolved to call an exterminator, but, like everything else during the day, that resolve fell under as the demands of work, with its endless waves of activity, crested over my best intentions and swept them out to sea. Finally, when I could stand it no more, and had even looked up the exterminator, there was a reprieve. The increasingly usual, unusually balmy weather that had extended right up to the beginning of November gave way to a brisk chill, and it seemed the bugs were defeated, not by my elegant tactical solutions, but by the sudden change in conditions. If mosquitoes have an insectival equivalent to “Never fight a land war in Asia,” I imagine it must be something like “Never fight a blood war in November”—they are, by nature, bound to lose. I returned to restful nights, sleeping with a soundness unavailable to me when I know there’s an assailant hovering in the corner, and loosened my defenses. Sometimes I even stayed up late reading, confident that when I closed my eyes and set down my book, sleep would come easily and well.

As any soldier could have told me, I should not have let down my guard so easily. Tonight, I stayed up particularly late, enduring with Robbie Turner the long march to Dunkirk, before turning in to catch five good hours. As I was slipping under, I absently scratched my shoulder blade, trying to reach from every angle the point at its tip which is inaccessible by my short fingers. My essays did not subdue the itch, and in my discomfort I flipped from side to side, once, twice, again, again, until the night watch quartered in my brain wrested itself awake, having too late noticed the enemy’s advance.

The bugs are back.

But this time, I’m afraid they’re something worse. Mosquitoes don’t leave bites that big, and there hasn’t been a drastic change in temperature to account for their resurgence. No more makeshift strategy, though—I’m not waiting to bring out the big guns. Prevention Pest Control can expect a call from me in the morning.

Edit, 4:00 am: It’s the damn mosquitoes. This time they’re biting my face. I am not amused.