Live and let die

I hate spiders. I have always hated spiders.

Most of the time when I was growing up and I saw a spider in my room, I could convince my dad to come kill it for me, but once when I was 10, my dad was at work and my mom was unsympathetic when I asked her to come kill the spider I'd seen. She followed me into my room and I hoped that she was about to exterminate the arachnid. Instead she told me to kill it. I approached the spider on the wall, but began to whimper in fear as I approached it. When she raised her voice to demand that I smash it, the whimpers turned into tears and this simple task turned into a battle of wills. We argued for 20 minutes with me sobbing and her yelling. The spider seemed oblivious to the humans arguing over his fate. Eventually the pressure became too much, and I stunned and killed the spider with a shoe between sobs.

That experience influenced the "live and let live" policy that I instituted when I moved into my first apartment. I saw very few spiders there, despite the fact that I lived on the ground floor, and I had no trouble letting those few spiders return to their dark homes after I saw them in my home. One night I was laying on my bed reading a book when movement out of the corner of my eye startled me. I looked over and realized that a spider had dropped off the ceiling onto my bedspread. I squealed and leaped off the bed. At that moment I frantically wished for a roommate to come find the sneaky spider on my quilt. I armored up for the battle, putting on shoes and grabbing a handful of paper towels, and began the hunt.

My patience paid off when I found the spider on the carpet next to my bed. I grimaced and whined a little bit as I ground the paper towels on the spider's body. I stepped back once the job was done and took some deep breaths, trying to calm the adrenaline pumping through my body.

That was when I decided, it might be an unpleasant chore, but from now on I would kill all spiders that dared to enter my house.