SLC Fever Dream

Salt Lake City, Utah: 7/19

My Airbnb is a charming older brick home, with high ceilings and crown molding, an ornate fireplace and a very large family of spiders who was here first and who would like exclusive bathroom privileges, please and thank you.

Each morning, I peer at the shower floor like a taxonomist labeling new arachnids only seen on the 600 block of SLC proper. Today a gaggle of baby spiders scurried around the rim of the tub and I was like, great, I haven't showered with company in a while, turned on the water, and got in with them.

Madi from one month ago would be like, wtfff. That Madi owned a house with no spiders, hated spiders, spiders scared her. She'd rather be out with her best friend from middle school, her other best friend from 10 years ago, her other other best friend from 2024, laughing and eating dinner and hanging on her massive velvet couch.

Now, it's just me and arachnida arhaearanea tepidariorum. I own nothing, I know no one. From social commitments 6 days each week to silence broken only by the shuffling of different sets of eight tiny legs.

Each night is a fever dream. Sleep, when? Wake, where? It's pitch dark, it's bright out, it's pitch dark, it's bright out, what time is it? Galaxies and strobe lights flash on the bedroom walls. Red yellow pink green red yellow pink green slept 4 hours last night. Dreams of fragments and splinters and color and chaos. Dreams of people I've never met, faces from the future and impending destiny and I stand, stunned, wondering if I wrote that dream down because here it is in real life and?

And dreams of you.

Just kidding. Never dreams of you.

"Are you so sure?" You ask behind me, the gravel in your voice like sandpaper on my skin, so close the hairs on my neck prickle.

My eyes snap open and I inhale sharply as a brown recluse crawls slowly over my cornea.