There is a mouse in the corner of my room. A mouse. In my bedroom. Where I sleep. It's sitting on its little haunches, frozen in fear. I'm in my bed, also frozen in fear.
We are making direct and intimate eye contact.
It's funny because seconds ago I was so cozy and comfortable in my bed, feeling safe and wrapped up and pleased with myself—here I am, in my new house, an adult at last, independent, free, worldly, some might even say sophisticated—and now, my shaking hand is reaching for my phone, ready to call Mum and say come back and get me right this second.
I don’t know how to end this standoff. Should I lie back in surrender, showing my belly like a dog? Or stand my ground, slowly wave my arms so it recognizes me as a human and backs off? That’s what you do if you encounter a bear, along with blowing a whistle. I memorized how to survive an encounter with a bear when I was ten, for no reason other than that I suddenly woke up one day with a pit of anxiety deep in my stomach about encountering a bear. I was also very worried about quicksand and the fact that I didn’t know how to tie an unbreakable knot or start a fire using nothing but two sticks. My ten-year-old self was earnestly imagining a future in which I would need these skills, even though I was a strictly indoors child who once cried because I was almost stung by a bee.
The thing is, I am a person who prepares. The very essence of who I am is my preparedness, my to-do lists, my thorough research, my above-and-beyond reading, my color-coded spreadsheets, my first-hand-in-the-air-I-know-the-answer energy. Before I moved out, I had a typed, itemized list of things I needed to buy, grouped by store, and then each item assigned to a person, so Mum and my older sister, Lauren, and I could get through the Boxing Day sales with the most efficiency. (Lauren looked at the list when I handed it to her and said, “No. Absolutely not. Brooke, why do you do this? I’m not coming anymore.”) And yet I didn’t research what to do when a mouse appears in the bedroom of your share house in the middle of the night. I should have screamed. But I didn’t scream when I first saw it, and it really feels like the appropriate window of time in which to scream has now passed.
