In my first week in Tokyo, I experienced an average of 0.75 cockroaches a day. Don't ask me why I had that much time on my hands to actually sit down and figure that roach statistic out. As the encounters with my disgusting trash-eating friends increased, so did my understanding for how I have to deal with the little(?) bastards.
No one else in your life can kill your cockroaches for you. Hell, they can survive a nuclear holocaust or something (along with Twinkies apparently). If I think of cockroaches as some of the biggest demons in my life, metaphorically and literally, I know that I am the only one who will be able to step up to bat when I see one scurry across the floor in the middle of the night.
My boyfriend nobly stood up to the task while wildly spraying the surrounding cabinet space around three of the week one cockroaches that we had found. Of course, despite the fact that he also suffers from a crippling fear of bugs, he isn't here very often. So while his efforts stem from a good heart, I am the one who has to live with them. And I will add that I was the one who ultimately had to sweep up their crispy bodies and throw them off the edge of the balcony. Can someone file a complaint against me for throwing dead cockroach bodies off the edge of the apartment building? That would be a great conversation to have with my parents as I am explaining to them why I had to come back to America. "Well, you see, I didn't want to touch their dead bodies, nor did I want to walk down the 5 flights of stairs to dispose of them properly in the trash..." Does my laziness know any bounds?
Regardless of whether or not I am going to get in trouble for ditching roach bodies in the bushes, which will be decided at a later point, this is not my first experience with the nasty critters in Japan. Despite the supposed upgrade in housing from my last basement level room that somehow always felt like a cold, sad, swamp-- the roaches are still here. I now live on a noisy yet sunny 5th floor apartment in a place that is much larger and supposedly nicer than my last housing arrangement. I am also partial to the belief that unless you are a billionaire, you will likely have a kind of run-down establishment in Tokyo. What Tokyo boasts in bright lights, all-you-can-drink bars, and maid cafes, it lacks in decent housing arrangements. I think the idea is that you are either supposed to be so busy at work or obligational drinking with your co-workers after work to even have time to come home to your roach infested abode. Unless, of course, you are the lonely American girl who spent a good twenty minutes of her night curled over in the middle of the kitchen floor sobbing for no apparent reason, then you will not have enough time to notice your roach stats on a weekly basis.
Strangely enough though, I have had a few Tokyo long-time locals tell me that in all their years they have never faced as many roaches as I have in just about 4 months total time. I swear I'm taking my trash out regularly and doing my dishes, so don't even look at me like that. In my last apartment I went as far as to plug every single drain or crevice that I thought they could crawl through, but at the end of the day a city full of millions of people has roaches and I am apparently the fucking cockroach whisperer.
The first time I saw a cockroach I thought I was going to die. I could feel my pulse race and my mind went into immediate fight or (most likely) flight mode. I watched that big ass bug crawling around on the wall in the hallway of my tiny apartment. The cockroach was the only thing between me and the exit. I took a deep, wavering breath, thinking it might be my last. I don't know honestly what I thought the outcome of this encounter would be, but I'm sure I've seen one too many scary movies, so I think I thought the roach might just murder me in cold blood right then and there. After spending way too many minutes contemplating how I could go back to America without having to run past the demon bug on the wall, I ran for it. I remember, just like in the scary movies, I could hear it scurrying after me as I fled the apartment. Yeah, you read that right, they don't run from you-- they run towards you. Once outside the apartment, I really wasn't sure of my plan. The only thought that was in my mind was, "I want to go home. Now." After enlisting the help of my fellow intern to dispose of my very first cockroach, I'm almost certain I went back into my room and cried. I don't know what it is about those bugs that seem to defeat me or come around when I feel defeated, but my innate fear for them inspires a big dose of, 'I want my mommy' syndrome.
Now, in my new apartment, the first damn thing I saw when I opened the door to what is supposed to be my year long accommodation, was a cockroach scurrying under a cupboard. Wherever I go, they follow. But the difference between this time and last time is that during our first tango, I grabbed my handy-dandy bottle of Gokiburi Jet and killed those bastards, two at one time. I barely even flinched. I get kind of power hungry as I watch them wither and die as if to say, "Yeah! I'm an adult and this is my house! I make the rules and I say you should get the fuck out!"
I now treat cockroach killing as a sort of power trip and I most definitely have listened to Marilyn Manson to get me pumped up for killing. But that innate fear is still there. However, if I may return to the beginning of this post, I mentioned that no one can kill your "roaches" but you. I see these disgusting garbage dwellers as a metaphor for my fear. What I once let drive me out of my own house I now stand and face on my own featuring a can of super poisonous scary Japanese death spray. And no one is coming out alive when I have my potentially cancerous to humans and definitely deadly to roaches spray. There are those, like my boyfriend, who can come along and lend you a hand when you are trying to "rid the infestation" but the only one who has to live with those "roaches" is you. I can't believe I'm actually getting motivated while talking about killing bugs, but you better believe it.
So while I pray every night before I sleep that a midnight bathroom run doesn't turn into me screaming and running for the bottle of death spray, I know that there are going to be hardships. No matter how hard we try to prepare for them, they will often run out in our path in the middle of the night and scare the shit out of us. Life is unpredictable. But it is up to us to have the strength to face the fears that crawl out of damp and dark spaces and try and make us feel even more weak when we are already curled up on the kitchen floor crying (everyone does that, right?). So I'm not going to let a bug make me feel weaker than I already do. And I will be the one to conquer my fears on my own, as it has to be done. While it's not wrong to lean on others for that support to face your fears, just remember that they won't be with you during that midnight pee run. So, for your own sake, you're going to have to learn to fight the hard fights alone (ft. death spray).
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