A Spider crawled across my desk

It was the first night of my last year at university. I’d just moved in with my third set of flatmates that I had nothing in common with. My mum had driven me up there. The drive was about five hours. We swapped over and took the drive in shifts and she ended up with the last one. The town was a nightmare maze of one-way streets and hills, my new house was on a cobbled street out of the way of everything, and she was stressed and tired. We got there at about 5pm.

My room was basically a cupboard and the mattress was at least ten years old, but it was cheap and I had no other options. I’d been recommended to this place after my flatmates from my second year, all of whom were a year above me had moved out. The next set of tenants were a big group that all wanted to share a house together and I guess I was just an odd fit and was squeezed out. It didn’t feel great.

I did a rudimentary job of unpacking and went down the street to the Chinese takeaway place that had been my main source of dinners for the last two years. I came back with a bag of food, retrieved a plate from the kitchen after making some small talk with my flatmates and trying to make out that I was normal, but then I retreated to my room to watch DVDs on my computer for the rest of the evening.

I shut the door, locked it behind me, and put the food and plate on my chair, and went to get my battered copy of the third (and fairly rubbish) season of Dexter that I’d been grinding my way through over the previous couple of weeks. I ended up giving up before the finale and never returned. According to fans, I made the right choice.

I went to sit down at my computer, when I froze.

There was the biggest spider on my desk that I have ever seen in the flesh. I swear it was about the size of my hand. I know any Australians reading this are going to laugh at me for reacting so shocked, but you don’t get huge spiders like this in the cold and drizzly outer reaches of Wales. Maybe it was someone’s pet that had escaped. For a second I thought it was a fake spider that one of my new anonymous flatmates had put there as a joke, but then I saw a leg twitch and it crawled forward ever-so-slightly, and I started juddering and I jumped out of my seat.

I’m not an arachnophobe usually. Usually I just get a cup and a bit of paper and throw them out of the window without much bother, but it was the fact it was so huge that terrified the life out of me. I know the old saying “its probably more afraid of you than you are of it” but given the depressive state I was in, my reaction to it was heightened. You can’t be rational when you’re depressed.

And that was when I imagined it speaking to me. I hallucinated the words coming out of its invisible mouth.

“Why are you here?” it asked.

“You don’t belong here. You’ve been here for two years now, praying you would fit in, and now look at you. Third flat in three years. No friends here. The only two people you almost made friends with this entire time dropped out and never talked to you again. Your dreams are out of reach. No one wants you. Why don’t you just go home?”

Body still violently shaking, I searched for anything I could use to get it out. A cup wouldn’t be big enough, I’d need a vase at least, or a jug.

I left the room. I didn’t bother my flatmates. Revealing I was this petrified of a spider would make me seem vulnerable and men aren’t allowed to be vulnerable for some stupid reason.

I found a jug that would be big enough and a bit of cardboard to put under it to cage the beast and returned to my room.

The spider was gone.

Part of me wanted to believe I’d imagined it, but I knew that wasn’t ever likely to be true.

I then saw a massive black silhouette on the curtain, the light of the streetlamp outside my window casting a much bigger shadow of its legs across my cupboard.

Body shaking more violently even than before, I jumped back and it fell onto the floor, where it scuttled away under my desk. I pulled the desk aside and saw it had crawled into the corner, where without thinking, I slammed the jug over it. I didn’t even look that closely at it before pushing the cardboard under the jug, going to the window, throwing it out, and slamming it shut behind me.

I returned to my bed, dinner forgotten by my computer, and I buried myself under the covers.

I still heard that hallucinated sentence in my head, circling my brain. “Why are you here?”, “ Why are you here?”, “Why are you here?”

I tried to respond to it.

I’ve come too far. I’ve done two years, there’s only one left, what else am I going to do? Go home, degreeless after all this time? Keep working at the supermarket where the customers hate me? Where do I go if not here?

People in my life kept on telling me that a degree wasn’t the only option post-education, but they never clarified what else there was. Its all very well to say “university is not all that”, which I agree its not, but if that’s your opinion, you need to back it up with something practical that someone lost and confused and directionless like the depressed undergraduate that I was could actually DO. That’s the difference between a reactionary opinion and a opinion I would respect: don’t just complain for the sake of it, explain what the alternative is and why it would be better.

As far as I knew, sticking it out was the only option.

It was very hard to respond to that imaginary spider-voice telling me that I didn’t belong here. I started crying. My stomach growled at me. I wanted to get up and go put my now cold food in the microwave but I couldn’t move. My body ached. The sound of my flatmates watching the Big Bang Theory downstairs was drilling into my skull.

I eventually fell asleep.

I was woken up at about 4am by the sound of one of my new flatmates and his girlfriend in the hall.

“Why can’t you just catch it and throw it out the window?” she asked.

“Because its so big it might eat me,” he said, half-joking, but I did detect some vulnerability there.

The window to my room was only about three feet from the bathroom window, which must have been open. The spider must have crawled in again through that. I kept my window shut for the rest of the year and was always on high alert in any other room in the house.

I probably could have used the spider incident as a bit of small talk with my flatmates over the next few days to get to know them, but I didn’t. I just stayed in bed most of the time.

For the rest of the year, I kept hearing that voice talking to me over and over again. It wasn’t the spider’s voice. It was my own voice.

“Why are you here?”

I tried to ignore it.

I got a 2:1 in the end. I think my degree is on my bookshelf somewhere.