you think, therefore they are

October 2023 

When you open the side door to your car, the underside of the white metal is swarming with insects. Boxelder bugs, if you want to be exact. Clamoring over one another, they pool in the residual heat radiating off of your car’s body.  

You drop the grocery bag you are holding and try not to scream.  

Your friend walks around the side of the car, their brow pinched. They examine the side of your white Subaru like it’s a poignant piece of modern art, highlighted against the night sky. “Ooh, yeah, that’s a lot of bugs,” they confirm. They put their hands on their hips and nod decisively. “Wow.”  

Before that declaration, you couldn’t be quite sure whether or not the sight in front of you was fabricated or factual. You couldn’t trust your own eyes. With the confirmation that another person can see them too, you feel suddenly, increasingly, irrational.  

Your vision blurs as the blood rushes from your head, and the ground feels simultaneously too close and too far away. You want to close your eyes, but you haven’t figured out yet that these bugs won’t go away if you do. 

The longer the door of your car stays open the further that creeping sensation down the back of your neck travels, and the more opportunity one of the nymphs has to pitch forward, off the upper rim of your car door and onto the springy seat of your vehicle.  

“It could be worse. They aren’t actually inside the car, see?” Your friend puts their face closer to the swarming mass. “They’re just hiding between the lip of the door and the side of the vehicle.”  

That doesn’t mean anything to you at all. Your eyes are locked to the side of your car as you watch the bugs rhythmically swirl. The patterns would be almost peaceful if there weren’t hundreds of them hiding in the cracks of the vehicle you’d just been driving around in. Your skin is prickling and twitching, and you can feel your neck tick awkwardly to the side. It sends a tremor up your spine into the base of your skull. Your ears are ringing.  

“Do you, like, want me to deal with those?” your friend asks, turning towards you, and you realize you’ve taken too long to respond.  

You nod, a welling of words stuck in your throat, and you steady yourself against a nearby lamppost before jerking away from it and brushing invisible dirt off your hand. You want to scrape every inch of skin off your body with a potato peeler and run it through the laundry. “Please,” you manage to whisper, and once you start, it’s like you can’t stop. “Please, fucking hell—please get rid of them, I can’t—” 

“Yeah, sorry, this can’t be fun with your bug thing. They’re real this time. Don’t look, go to the other side of the car,” your friend advises you, but you can’t. You’re stuck where you stand staring at the swarm and you can’t feel your toes and your mouth tastes like bile.  

The top-down lighting from the telephone pole behind you floods the scene as your friend takes their hand and starts scooping handfuls of live insects onto the crunchy gray pavement below your feet. You feel the cold metal of the pole press into your back and you flinch instinctively away from what could be the hot rod sparking at the bugs that live underneath your skin.  

Later that night, your friend tells your roommate everything that happened while you sob in the bathroom, naked. Your clothes are splayed on the floor around you, haphazardly thrown from wall to wall, and your makeup has streaked down your cheeks. You look at your red-rimmed eyes in the mirror and wonder how you got here. 

Your roommate is listening while your friend describes the scene. You imagine your friend crouching on your floor while your roommate sits at her desk. Her desk lamp is on, angled at the ceiling and casting warm light across her face. You imagine her features pinching with worry as your friend talks.  

 “It was like a horror movie in there,” your friend finishes, shaking their head. “Even I was freaked out, and I can handle bugs.”  

---

December 2021 

The first day of the reorganization of your brain starts with a positive COVID test. You are newly eighteen and home from college on the winter break of your freshman year. Your family is waiting in the room with you when that second pink line appears on the top of the rapid test you took fifteen minutes prior, and you are thankful you’re already wearing a mask.  

You spend the next week floating in and out of consciousness, sleeping seventeen hours a day, and eating only handfuls of the blandest foods you can stomach. Cheerios and ginger ale are the sickness snacks of your youth, and though your stomach grumbles unhappily at your newly adjusted diet, you can’t think of eating anything more than that during mealtimes.  

When you reach the seventh day of your illness, you’re feeling well enough to sit in your family’s basement and watch television by yourself. The air is cooler down here, and it feels nice against your previously feverish skin. It makes the furniture colder too, and the blue futon you’re sitting on is scratchy but pleasantly chilled.  

Something stupid is on the television, old episodes of a show you used to binge when you were younger. As you crisscross your legs, you squint at the screen through watery eyes. Crumpled tissues and glasses of half-drunk water surround you, the damage left in the wake of the tornado of sickness. You sit at the very center of it all and sniffle, drifting in and out of sleep.

---

January 2022 

It has always been easier to sleep at home than in your college dorm. Not that you don’t enjoy going to school, but there’s something about sleeping in your own bed, where you can roll over and starfish across your comforter without fear, that just feels better. Winter break reminds you of this fact, as hard as you try to forget while you’re away. Once you’ve recovered from COVID, you toss and turn, unable to pin down why you feel so out of place.  

You’re at home and you’re supposed to be safe, but you snap back into your body in the middle of your bedroom floor, spikes of pain shooting up your left arm and your heart racing. Rolling over onto your side with a silent, choking motion, your eyes open. You dig your fingers into the long, fluffy carpet. Something is wrong, something is in the bed with you. You swear you can feel it touching you.  

The room is pitch black, and if you were in your right mind, your brain would be able to recognize where you are. If your heart would stop racing for just a moment, you would be able to realize that you were still parallel with the bed you just leapt out of. You would be able to pinpoint the cracks of lamplight filtering through the windows on the other side of the room. You would be able to reach out and touch the bottom of your dresser, an old boxy thing that your family bought from Bed Bath & Beyond in your youth. Instead of doing any of that, you curl in on yourself and try not to call for your mother, feeling like you’re six all over again. When you turn on the light with shaking fingers and peel back your covers, there is nothing there.  

The next morning, you wake up with bruising blooming down your arm, and your mother concludes that all of your stress about school and work has triggered nightmares. She offers you low-dosage melatonin to take back to school in the spring and you accept. You go back to school and start with two pills a night, then three, then four. You sit in bed and listen to your heartbeat race for hours before you fall asleep each night, and you wake up the next morning with heavy eyelids and twitchy fingers. Whenever your mother calls to ask how you’re sleeping, you have the same answer for her; it isn’t working. Not yet, at least. It’s not the melatonin’s fault. You can’t seem to make the prickling of your skin and the sense that there’s something wedged between your blanket and your side go away. 

But right now you just want to feel normal, and this isn’t helping. The little white bottle moves from your nightstand to the back of your dresser drawer. 

---

February 2022 

You let yourself think that maybe the shapes are just tricks of the dark, nightmares, for a while. You’re wrong, you have psychosis. You don’t consider psychosis because you’ve never considered a term like that in a real, tangible way before, and because you’re not a medical professional.  

Your skin prickles with unseen insects at all hours of the day: as you walk from class to class, as you sit in the back of a lecture hall, when you’re eating food with your friends. You continue to have trouble sleeping despite the melatonin, tossing and turning and sitting awake and spiraling as quietly as you can after your roommate has already drifted off. Once you’ve woken her up multiple nights in the same week, you’ll begin to feel guilty, but for now, you only worry about it in concept.  

Your blankets are too soft, and every brush of fabric against the hair on your legs makes you twitch a little bit and reposition yourself. The springs in your school bed protest every time you do this, and that makes you worry about waking your roommate up again. The self-fulfilling cycle only amplifies your hypersensitivity to the material touching your skin, and you stay up longer, toss and turn more. Being back at school for the spring semester makes it worse, and your brain is overwhelmed with the contradictions between home and here. 

Around 3 a.m., as you’re lying awake in bed listening to your roommate’s steady breathing, you watch a spider the size of your hand crawl up the wall to your left and start making its way across the ceiling above you. It’s completely soundless and almost entirely circular, sinking its legs into the soft cork of your drop ceiling. The windows on your half of the dorm are pressed up against the headboard of your bed, and the shades are up so that your house plants can get light during the day; moonlight casts a long beam of light and even longer shadows behind it. The spider that is not really in the room with you dangles in front of your face as you sit paralyzed beneath it. It smiles at you with its eyes, glassy and reflective in the night.  

When you find your voice, you’re yelling.  

Suddenly, the room floods with light, expanding from your shitty yellow overhead fixture and illuminating the white drop ceiling and painfully undecorated walls. Your roommate stands next to the light switch, blinking away sleep. “There’s nothing there!” she says, one hand out towards you. “See? It’s okay.” 

But you’re shaking your head now, eyes locked onto where you can still see the spider. It’s a little more cartoonish than you thought it was, but you watch as it lingers there for a moment before skittering around to the other side of the light.  

You refute her, knowing you sound even crazier now that it’s disappeared from your sight, but it feels more real in a fully lit room. You know what you didn’t see.  

Scrambling out of bed, your feet hit the cold linoleum, and you duck as low as possible while circling in the center of the room. If your roommate can’t see the spider, and you can’t see the spider, why was it so obvious before? You’ve never felt more aware of every motion at the edge of your eyes.  

You’re forced to squint against the sharp contrast, staring up into the yellow light of the bulb, but there is no spider the size of your hand. You flinch anyway.

---

March 2022 

Your therapist has informed you that you may be suffering from a form of post-COVID psychosis, which is one way long-COVID symptoms can manifest. The name doesn’t really matter, it’s all the same to you. There’s a painful lack of research done on the symptom, but you read that similar post-COVID cases had been shown to materialize as anything from the feeling of bugs crawling over your skin to an intense wanting to kill your friends and family. Hallucinations can be visual or auditory, and result from inflation of the brain. If this is true, then your symptoms are only temporary, no more than ninety days at the very worst, but that’s not taking into account the months of recovery your brain might need after the first incident.  

You don’t want to murder your friends and family, and you’re grateful for that. If this is post-COVID psychosis, you have a very mild case. You start to hash out options with her, different medications and treatments and ways to stop feeling like your heart has leapt into your throat when a normal stink bug crawls onto your desk in the middle of class.  

Gnats that aren’t there follow you into lecture halls, you can see ants crawling overtop your backpack inside closed rooms. You squeeze your eyes shut until red blots bloom against your closed lids and reopen them, watching the bugs until you can’t find them anymore. Once they’re gone, you look for a sign that they were really there to begin with.  

It feels childish, shrieking every time a beetle lands on your arm or twitching every time a shadow flickers across your wall. Bugs are vital to the health of the environment. In your childhood, you loved grabbing fistfuls of worms and catching lightning bugs in the yard. You asked for a ladybug farm for Christmas. You’ve always been afraid of spiders, but you’ve understood the irrationality of that fear since you were small.  

Your ninety days are almost up, and you are ready to be free. Halfway through the spring semester of your freshman year, you hear a commotion in the hallway. You and your roommate find your next-door neighbor’s door propped open, your RA standing in said doorway with a bottle of Everspring lemon and mint cleaning solution in her hand.  

You slip on your rattiest pair of bright blue flip-flops and follow her out the door, closing it behind you. It clicks shut in a set of two. Your next-door neighbor is sitting on the far side of her room, features twisted with disgust as she bounces her legs against the bottom of her bed frame. You notice that the sheets are stripped off her bed, and her black nylon mattress springs softly with every kick of her legs.  

“What’s going on?” you ask. It almost looks like she’s moving out, personal items scattered in piles around the room. Her walls aren’t quite as painfully bare as yours are, and she has some additional furniture, white cabinets and cupboards. Then, you notice the red solo cups scattered across the floor. 

“We left some juice out and when I woke up, they were all over the walls,” your neighbor explains, pointing towards the brick divider between your room and hers. You follow her finger to the corner, where a steady stream of ants is making their way to and from the gap in the drop ceiling.  

You inhale in one sharp motion.

“Oh, maybe don’t look at that,” your roommate offers. “Hey, you can go back to the dorm.”  

But you shake your head, and then your arms. Then you take two little steps in place, to disconnect the closed circuit created between your shoes and the slightly sticky ground. You can feel the phantom insects crawling over the ridged edge of your shoes and up your ankles already. The part of you that wished for the validation of reality only weeks ago shrivels in on itself, petrified.  

“What are you gonna do about them?” you ask. 

“File a work order with Res Life. I tried calling already but no one picked up.” Your RA pulls her hair back into a high ponytail and hefts her bottle of Everspring, spraying it at the large black ants all over the wall and floor. “Look at the size of those things,” she grumbles. “See that one over there? If they’re growing wings like that, the colony is getting ready to split.”  

You stand there in the doorway, watching one of the winged ants writhe and twitch in a puddle of cleaning solution.

---

April 2022 

Later that week, you find yourself face to face with three of the largest ants you’ve ever seen. Comically, ostentatiously huge. Your mind is just showing off at this point. They’re standing in the space between your and your roommate’s beds, occupying the entire center of the room. Their heads crest over the top of your comforter even with all six feet solidly on the floor, and one of them wiggles its antennae in your general direction, like a wave.  

The next day, your RA sticks her head in the ceiling of the building and confirms that there is a massive colony of carpenter ants living in the ceiling above your room. Your neighbor, who had been dealing with the brunt of the ants until that point, moves across the hall to room with a friend. You start waking up with ants trailing down the walls, ants in bed with you. You close your eyes and wait for them to fade into nothing, but when you open them the ants are still there.  

You can feel the insects settling in the bubbles between your skin and your shirt, places where the worn fabric bunches too close, where the textile pills against your skin. You’ll sit in a lecture and twitch, an endless game of whack a mole, needing to reach out and verify, squash clothing flat to reassure yourself that anything you thought was there is not. You have it down to a science now, stripping all the clothing off your body, shaking out every sheet on your bed, combing your fingers through every inch of your tight-knit curls. You’re tired, in the way where you’ve surpassed the need to try and sleep. Your bones ache, and your tongue feels heavy. To try and quiet the part of your brain that said just being under the covers wasn’t safe enough anymore, you’ve taken to sleeping with mosquito netting over yourself at night.  

You feel safer during the day; you can keep moving, keep busy. Most of the time, when you see crickets or flies or spiders of unusual size, you can verify their existence or lack thereof. There’s none of that at night, when you need to slow your heart rate to a steady beat and keep yourself quiet. At night, your perceived world becomes you and that which you imagine alone in the dark. You start seeing ants more and other bugs less. Even worse, you start looking for them when they aren’t there. 

---

May 2022 

You move out of your ant-infested dorm. You know how impractical it is to move from one dorm to another with three weeks left in your freshman year, but you don’t care. The mosquito netting didn’t help your paranoia. Moving out does. 

When moving into an upperclassmen residence hall across campus, you and your roommate meticulously check every object you own for insects before transferring them to the new dorm. Dead ants tumble out of your blankets when you shake them, and you throw them in the washer without a second glance.  

It’s quieter here, and you feel certain that whatever you think you see isn’t real. You wake up the night before your final exam to a buzzing noise. You’ve gotten better at identifying the hallucinations, and you sit up in bed, taking care not to disturb your roommate. You are convinced there is a bee in the room, so you tell yourself that you can only hear a bee in the room because you think it’s there, and you force yourself to sit back down, to keep the lights off. The air conditioning unit could have kicked on, or maybe something is rattling in the pipes in your walls.  

The next morning, you find a dead wasp curled up on the corner of your desk, contorted in on itself, limbs curved tightly against its small body. Your brain short circuits in your skull, and everything that had started to make sense melts at the edges.  

---

 

February 2023 

While you’ve discussed antipsychotics with your therapist and decided they weren’t worth the potential future hassle, you’ve enjoyed the reprieve brought with time. Your psychosis-specific hallucinations are beginning to fizzle, but the results of countless paranoia-filled nights, unable to tell if the insects in the room with you were real or fake, have left your mind desperate to fill in gaps that shouldn’t exist.  

Sophomore year, you find yourself more thankful than ever for walls that touch the ceiling. There are no speckled drop ceiling tiles to warp up from the supportive grid they rest on this year; the sharp edges of your room are decisive. When you walked in during move-in day and saw them, you felt your legs go wobbly with relief.  

You’ve learned the language to explain to others the buzzing of chitin wings folding over one another, the hum you can imagine in the back of your head. You discuss with your therapist the spindly prickling that trickles down from the base of your skull to the tips of your toes, the inadvertent twitch of your head as you brush off something you can’t see and can’t hear.  

Now you feel the need to mention it every time you jerk to the side, every time you vault to your feet, fast twitch muscles a step ahead of your own comprehension. In those moments, you’re a puppet with a soul, instinct forced to your forefront even as you react to things you no longer fear quite so much. You’ve self-actualized without changing a single behavior, and it’s frustrating. You are still learning when to ignore unknowns. Sometimes it’s better not to decide, no good comes in the short term from agonizing. You will get better.  

One cold morning before your early class, you’re positioning as much of your body as you can under the warmth coming from the shower head as you wait for your conditioner to set in. The air is dense with steam, and every blink feels heavy on your lashes. As you run your fingers through your hair, you watch a silverfish slip down the water bonded curls and off the tips. It hits the floor scrambling and washes into the drain before you can figure out whether or not what you just saw really happened.  

---

 

September 2023 

It’s not that you don’t see what isn’t there, because sometimes you still do. The bugs you imagine lurking around every corner are present in every speck of dirt on your car dashboard and every shadow that passes overhead. They’re smaller now, the voice crying danger in your head is less vocal.  

The first night you relax enough to get a decent sleep, you wake up feeling more well-rested than you had in months, and you see a glimpse of a time when these moments are less frequent. You don’t feel like you need to block out the insects that live inside your head now, you can find the reality in the fiction. You can exist within spaces you’ve seen bugs in previously. There’s a distinct lack of unease every time you enter your own dorm room this year, even though your suitemate had to rescue you from a particularly large and very real spider the first night you slept in it.  

Sometimes you need to smack yourself on the arm in public, murmuring quiet apologies at the strange looks you get. Sometimes you need to strip naked in the bathroom and sob about the thought of ever getting back in your car again. Sometimes, you don’t need to do anything at all, and that’s the strangest feeling.  

Walking to your first class of the new semester, you admire the flowering bushes outside your residence hall and watch the bees buzzing around them. Stringy grass pokes up through the concrete sidewalk, and ants are swarming around a crumbled sugar cookie that’s been mashed into it. You can see a stink bug wiggling its antennae as it hangs onto a dusty window screen. The warmer months are waning, and soon everything will frost over. It’s not a countdown for you this year, you are content to let the last remnants of summer linger a little longer.  

The complications of what was and what wasn’t and what existed but only within your psyche are all jumbled together. They are each intrinsic to understanding one another and entirely separate. You can sort through them at your own leisure now. It’s unreasonable to assume that you’ll ever stop seeing insects, but at least you can be confident that these ones are real.