A spider took up residence in my conservatory several months ago. It’s not enormous, half an inch in diameter, but I hate spiders. Winter loomed. Those were days of dread. A seasonal terror gnaws at people who live at northern latitudes as the sun sets incrementally sooner. Here in Cornwall, the exact time of sunset means little when clouds and rain can make it night-ish at three. Having a spider suspended overhead by the door, just over my clothes-drying rack, doesn’t help when my insides are already chewing themselves up over the darkness to come.
My partner doesn’t hate spiders, or didn’t, or doesn’t. The tension of tenses matters here not because he’s dead but because he’s my ex now. He could have died, perhaps nearly died. When he’d find a spider in his own house, he’d pick it up and toss it out the window. Don’t live in my house, he would say as the thing went airborne. But he didn’t scold the two false widows he found behind the washing machine. Those, he left where they were. They didn’t get him, epilepsy did. It went undiagnosed until his late fifties. In the three and a half years we lasted, he had several smaller seizures. He’d go out for a run and come to an hour later, lying in one of the fields near his home, his dog licking his face. He ignored those episodes in the “surely it’s not that” kind of way that sometimes puts the afflicted in graves. The day a grand mal dropped him flat on his back in his garden, the dog ran up to the house barking to get his son’s attention. The dog saved his life, I suspect. It could have happened in the road. No one let me know until later. I live a short walk from the hospital.
I’m American. In my North Carolina of the ‘70s and ‘80s, big cans of bug spray were the answer to everything with more legs than our cats. I couldn’t stand bugs then and I still can’t. Exceptions can be made for the friendly ones: butterflies, dragonflies, ladybugs, grasshoppers, bees. But a wasp flew into my shirt once and stung me several times. I must have been nine or ten. It hurt like what I thought getting shot would, bam bam bam. I still have a sense-memory of the thing crawling down my chest before the pain hit. Even if I hadn’t panicked, hadn’t provoked it, it would have stung me anyway, or so my mother claimed as she daubed baking soda paste on the burning, throbbing welts. I hate wasps and hornets and yellowjackets, anything with a stinger and a mean streak. I hate the zigzag transdimensional flight paths of mosquitoes almost as much as I hate their bites. I hate spiders the most, though: the way they scuttle, their terrible symmetries. When I encounter one, decisions have to be made.
My cat’s health began to fail about a year ago. The longhaired breeds are susceptible to kidney trouble. Early on, the vet told us that’s what would kill him. We could expect a lifespan of about 13 years, he said. We got lucky: the trouble started at 13 instead of ending there. Bloodwork in a regular checkup turned up a few red flags. Put him on a renal diet immediately, the vet advised. If he won’t eat it, mix it in with his regular food until you wean him off the stuff he enjoys. I ordered several kidney-friendly options online, mixed them and swapped them out in different combinations, and panicked when he refused to touch them at all. This went on for weeks. He lost so much weight that I took him back to the vet. I can’t starve him to save him, I said. The vet replied, cats are gonna cat. Those were days of dread too.
When someone is tired of you, there are clues. You notice they’ve stopped saying I love you first. Then they stop saying it as a reply. You come to feel you shouldn’t say it anymore yourself. It’s too obvious a prompt. Their face hardens instead of softens. There are tight, impatient smiles and the occasional eyeroll. A sharp tone of voice, a note of irritation no effort is made to conceal. Replies to text messages come later and later, if at all. The pattern is hard to ignore. It’s the diagnosis, I kept telling myself. The indignity. The loss of agency. I sobbed the day he told me it was epilepsy. He’d have to give up driving for a year. Cornwall’s public transport sucks at best. Trains get cancelled all the time. Storms hit; fallen trees block the tracks; there are driver shortages. Buses where he lives run every two hours if they show up at all. He’d lose his spontaneous jaunts to the beach or the moors after work. He keeps a classic MG roadster in the garage—British Racing Green, of course. He restored it himself. Now it would be a year until he could drive it again, if and only if he didn’t have another seizure in the months ahead. Everything hinged on the meds working. Side effects were known to include violent mood swings and inchoate rage on top of the baseline despair.
Although I didn’t think I could remake myself as the kind of guy who’d pick a spider up, tell it not to live in my house, and chuck it out the nearest window, I tried in my own way. It was more about holding onto something I could see slipping out of my grasp than it was about any sort of release. The occasional bee would fly in. My partner kept bees. Ex-partner keeps bees. Tenses, tension. Even without today’s prevailing apiary doom narratives, I couldn’t bring myself to smash a bee or spray one. They’re important. Instead, I’d trap them with a glass and a piece of stiff paper, then release them outside. Crane flies too, although their spindly legs rarely survived my good intentions. One night I noticed a small spider walking across the wall behind the sofa. Normally that would be a death sentence. It looked like it hadn’t had the best day, though. It looked injured. Can spiders limp? Across the room, my cat was napping on his heated bed. I’d put him back on the food he preferred. He’d gained weight again. He felt normal when I cuddled him or picked him up. But I could see the insidious changes—drinking more water, peeing more, snuggling less, seeming dazed at times, throwing up. I did not smash the spider.
The night my partner assaulted me, I didn’t think to call it an assault, nor the next day, nor the day after that. Did that really just happen, I asked his son afterward. He had seen the whole thing. Denial is like that. There’s a first time for everything. It was a dinner party. Half the guests had gone home. There was wine involved. I tripped going up the low stone stairs in the garden, injured my left foot. I limped over to the bench he’d curled up on. Blackout drunk, he snarled when he saw me coming. Think of Jekyll and Hyde. I decided to take video. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten hammered, morphed into a hateful stranger, and said or done ghastly things he would regret in the morning but not remember. It’s the diagnosis, I kept telling myself. It’s the side effects. The meds. The interactions. He wasn’t like that before. I was thinking epilepsy thoughts when he jumped up from the bench, knocked my phone out of my hand, grabbed me, and threw me to the ground. Already favoring my throbbing left foot, I landed hard on my right one. Fractured something, I think, and didn’t feel it at the time. My left foot already hurt too much. His son and I managed to put him to bed. I stayed up until four trying to convince his son that his dad wasn’t like that, that it wasn’t him. Side effects, meds, interactions. In the morning, my partner woke up with a blinding headache and in a haze of dread. He knew something awful had happened, just not what. He apologized. He was horrified. We both cried. He insisted we go for a walk after breakfast to clear our heads. I couldn’t keep up and he wouldn’t slow down. I still limp some days.
I’m autistic. Diagnosed a year ago. Finding that out in my fifties was like being handed a Rosetta stone that deciphered my entire life. The food issues, the texture issues, the constant grinding tension and anxiety, all of it. The night of the dinner party, everyone was sitting around my partner’s living room chatting. Both of his kids were there with their own significant others. Couple of friends from the village as well. With the music turned up, everyone’s voices made sounds shaped like words. I could hear but not follow along. To an extent, lipreading helped. Trouble with auditory processing is another of those quirky, inconvenient autistic things. Rather than adjusting the volume, he handed me my wine glass and told me just drink. He’d once shoved me across the kitchen instead of turning Spotify down so I could hear him better, so this didn’t come as a total surprise. It’s the diagnosis, I kept telling myself. Side effects. Meds. Interactions. He wasn’t like that before.
When the end came, he had another ruinous hangover and couldn’t remember the previous night, only that he’d done something bad again. No violence this time, no fractured bones, just a drunken tirade: I disgusted him, he couldn’t stand me. That morning, he confessed he knew how he’d been treating me. He’d been hoping I’d just get sick of his bullshit and walk. Easier that way. For him, at least. And to cope, he’d been keeping a diary. He showed me a year’s worth of handwritten entries, page after page, lines of dense scribble about the relationship he didn’t want to be in. Now he didn’t want to lie anymore, didn’t want to keep pretending. When someone is tired of you, there are clues. I’d seen them all, connected the dots, and prayed it was the diagnosis and not the truth of him. For a year, my insides had been chewing themselves up. Those were days of dread. I felt like ashes.
When the next ending came not too long after, there had been a reprieve. The second-hardest thing about taking care of a longhaired cat with failing kidneys is the thirst, as it turned out. The hardest thing is knowing what’s ahead. He’d guzzle water from his bowl, so much and so often that the fur on his face and neck stayed sopping wet. I would chase him around the house with a wad of paper towels or a microfiber cloth, sometimes a hair dryer. Just when I’d get him semi-dry again, he’d go back for more. Cats are gonna cat. This went on for weeks before I thought to buy him a fountain he could drink from without getting drenched. Once his fur finally dried, he bounced back, started eating again, put on the weight he’d lost. Those were days of dread too, albeit sweet ones. I had three more months with him. The decline, when it came, was sharp and sudden. The end happened when it had to. The vet made a home visit. I have his ashes in a bamboo box.
I hate spiders. If the one in my conservatory had turned up anywhere else in the house, I’d have killed it without hesitation. One once crawled across my left ear while I was lying in bed. It met a quick, splattery end. But with another living being incrementally slipping away in front of my fireplace, I couldn’t smash this little speck of fading life. They don’t live long, less than a year. Every day I think about getting it over with, spraying it, something. I think about capturing it, telling it not to live in my house, and tossing it out the door into the garden. Yet I’m afraid it will get away when my big clumsy hand tears through its web. I’m also afraid that it won’t, that I’ll end up touching it. I’m afraid of it running up my arm. I’m afraid of it growing larger, maybe jumping at me. I still have sense-memories of a wasp inside my shirt, of a spider crawling across my left ear. In the months ahead, I will be leaving: I don’t want to live in this house anymore; I don’t want to stay in this part of the country. These have been days of dread. I feel like ashes. Decisions have to be made.