There’s a lot going on here to unpack.
- This is me in the basement of my apartment building on Sunday afternoon.
- This mirror is right below where someone spray painted — in bright red, I might add — NO PAIN NO GAIN. Soon after, our landlord started locking the basement and hiding the key in the shadows of the doorway. It was hidden in plain sight, wrapped in a piece of black trash bag so it blended in to it’s surroundings. The basement isn’t locked anymore, and anyone can go down there. But really only we do. And yet: NO PAIN NO GAIN.
- We have this comically successful tomato plant in our backyard and it just keeps producing these wonderful, beautiful, yellow fucking tomatoes which in six short weeks have gone from being our magic earthly inheritance to a major stressor.
- WHAT THE HELL DO YOU PROPOSE WE DO WITH ALL OF THESE TOMATOES?
- We’ve made tomato jam. Mark Bittman’s. Jalapenos, lime juice, sugar, chili powder. It’s very…specific. It’s really great. But really how much can you eat? Don’t tell me to can it in the real way! I do not want to put it up. I don’t want to boil jars multiple times. In fact I have literally everything you need to can/pickle/preserve. I have tongs, I have a funnel, I have Ball jars, I have the huge stainless steel pot that I requested for Christmas. I STILL REFUSE.
- The tomatoes aren’t even the story. The story is that there is a colony of mosquitoes in our backyard and they have one thing on their (collective) mind: total annihilation of the human race.
- I am not one for bug spray. It seems cancerous, poisonous, onerous, odorous.
- I still use it. The organic natural kind but still: I use it.
- That should tell you all you need to know.
- Not really.
- WE HAVE TO PUT IT ON OUR FACES.
- We spray the bug spray into our hands, rub our hands all over, and then rub this noxious crap into our faces. Our eyelids!
- This is what I wore outside on Sunday. I felt like I was finally getting wise to the situation. Button up buttoned all the way up. Leggings and socks and sneakers. Only my face and hands revealed. We went out and it was a lovely day — not even that hot. I felt fine in my mosquito repellent uniform. Bug spray sweat was not even dripping into my eyes. There were so many tomatoes. Too many. The plant is starting to die (it’s not one plant, it’s a few. We don’t even know anymore how many. Just this great big bush, really, climbing and collapsing and overgrowing everywhere. We are on the one hand terrible tomato stewards and on the other, really fucking good at growing tomatoes. I think it’s a fluke. Benign neglect. The tomatoes feel empowered! And useful. We have confidence in them to figure it out for themselves.) and I feel very sad about that, though D has assured me this is the natural course of things.
- On Sunday I found myself somewhat frantically trying to tear out all the dead leaves and vines with my bare hands. Just grabbing and throwing and yanking and a little shameful, wanting to get it over with quickly. Like when you’re eating something really bad for you and you eat it even faster so it goes away and you can forget more quickly that you ate it. But there’s always more.
- Then suddenly mid-vine yank I felt overpowered with HISTAMINES. Like some threshold was reached and all of my body from the waist downward suddenly itched with such force that I jumped in the air and shook all over.
- When I shook, a sea of mosquitoes flew off my body. I saw them fly out in all directions.
- I had the immediate urge to slap and scratch and SCREAM, really.
- In my leggings.
- “Baby, I have to go in.” “Okay, can you take the tomatoes?”
- I stopped, though, to take a picture.
- I got upstairs and realized I didn’t have a key.
- I ran back down frantic and scratching, adrenaline pumping through my body.
- “I NEED KEYS. I’VE BEEN EATEN ALIVE!”
- When I got through the door I stood in the kitchen and yanked my pants down around my ankles, stepped out of my shoes and RAN to my bed, scratching furiously.
- I laid face down on the bed scratching and rolling around and finding new bites and just losing it.
- D came in. “OH MY GOD!”
- He immediately grabbed my phone from me to take a picture of my bare ass and legs, COVERED in mosquito bites.
- We counted 36. All swollen and red and huge.
- I really wish asses weren’t a thing you aren’t supposed to show people. How hard it is to have this amazing picture of my ass covered in these insane bites, and not really have anyone I can show it to.
- I mean, I showed it to Halle.
- I don’t think I can send it to my mom. I keep thinking about that, though.
- Halle says it seems like something I can show people. I said no, I don’t need everyone to know that my thighs are bigger than my ass.
- She said she thinks maybe everyone’s are when you’re lying down.
- I’m not sure I believe that. Like at all.
- I realized later why they only bit the back of my thighs and my ass.
- That’s where the leggings were stretched thin enough that the mosquitoes could get through to me.
- Thanks, Uniqlo.
- Thanks, ass.
- Thanks, universe.
- You’re welcome, world.
