i was not alone in my bed last night
Last night after I got back from the gym I heard a loud chirping noise coming from somewhere in my bedroom. A cricket had found its way in somehow, and its whimsical song reminded me of good old 1991 insomnia, when the crickets outside would keep me awake on spring nights and I would lie there staring at the ceiling trying to drown it out with late-night radio. I was ten, and I had gotten so used to the routine that I preoccupied myself by listening for one of my favorite tidbits, like the commercial where the grizzly-sounding man describes a hearty steak-and-eggs meal in such a way that actually made my mouth water, or the song where the guy says "I love you period, and do you love me question mark..."
I briefly considered killing it. Then I remembered that I can't even kill poisonous spiders, and weren't crickets supposed to be good luck or something? I am in China, after all. Besides, I couldn't find the thing. Being aware of the presence of a small creature in the room with me is intimidating, I'm ashamed to say, because I'm afraid of letting my guard down and then finding it on my shirt, or my face, or the bottom of my shoe. I gave up looking for it and went back to chatting online, actually telling the creature out loud that it had better get all that confounded chirping out of its system before I got tired and wanted to go to bed. Just in case though, I set up my living room chairs facing each other so I could sleep on them - how lame am I to even consider being kicked out of my room by a cricket...
Brendan suggested (enclosed by a disclaimer outlining his buzzedness and lack of knowledge on the subject) that maybe crickets sing based on the temperature in the air or something. Anything was worth a try, so I shut my door and turned the AC on full-blast. Weirdly enough, the thing shut up five minutes later and didn't make a peep all night long.
I figured it had found a way out of my room and left or something, but today at lunch when I stripped my bed to make it, there it was, sitting on my mattress pad. Apparently I'd slept with it the night before, and if its current position was any indication, it had been under the covers with me the whole time. I looked at the cricket. "What are YOU doing here?" It waved its antennae wildly and said nothing. The first time I came to China my mother fashioned a little cricket with an adorable smiling face out of cardboard and construction paper as a good luck charm for me, and looking at the little bug I thought of that.
Taking a piece of paper, I scooped him up, nervous that he would jump. (Yes, I've purposely switched pronouns.) He seemed quite happy to stay, almost as if he knew I was taking him back home. "Don't you jump," I said, to make sure. We walked, shoeless, down the hall to the seventh floor elevator and waited for it to come up from the first floor. On the way down we made three stops, and I chatted with people in Chinese about how I was taking the cricket outside. We headed out the front door and off to a patch of grass on the side, where I set him free.
A good omen as I go off to Changchun for the weekend.