Musing or "My Little Toilet Partner"

I discovered our bathroom spider at the most unlikely of times.

Two days earlier, I met the most heavenly piece of meat ever sliced from a dead animal. The chefs had taken their time with this one, letting it marinate to delectable goodness before encrusting the outside with herbs and fresh garlic. How long they cooked it didn't really matter to me. As the tender pieces slid down my carnivorous throat, my sole thought was: By the claw, what fantastic prime rib.

The curse of most food products lies in the pleasure they invoke going in rather than coming out. It'd taken two days for this piece of wonder to make its debut on the other end, and I'm sure my body milked it for all its nutritional worth. It was time to 'lay down the law', and I was ready. The details of my defecation are unimportant, I'll just say that everything was coming out fine. I'd much rather talk about the scintillating article I was perusing in Reader's Digest. But that's not what you're waiting for, is it?

I hadn't meant to drop the magazine on the floor. One of those annoying little cardboard coupons playfully obscured my vision for the last time. No damage done, I thought, and leaned to pluck it from the mini-tiled floor. It was at this point that I glanced to the right and saw it.

The body was small, no larger than the tip of a ballpoint pen. It had legs that looked about three inches long each, giving it the appearance of taking up more space than it did. It hung upside down, directly underneath the toilet paper dispenser. The spider seemed about as large as a tennis ball -- or perhaps it was just a piece of my imagination working on me. The creature's legs wiggled just enough to inform me that it was alive. My response was swift and efficient.

"Aaagh!" I exclaimed, cringing away from it.

I don't know when the last time you were in a dorm bathroom, but I feel obligated to give you an idea of what environment I was dealing with. The toilets are positioned in such a way that they fit into an alcove toward the back of the room. The alcove is only three feet wide from sidewall to sidewall, and about two feet deep, just enough room for a toilet and some semblance of privacy. Some people call it cozy and intimate. Others scoff at using words so affectionate to describe what amounted to a pot in a dingy corner. At one point the square inch tile was probably bright white with rich green and beige colors. Today, the beige has spilled into the other colors, infecting them with the tan marks of age.

But anyway, about this spider: I'm only slightly arachnophobic, so I didn't go into immediate cardiac arrest. The reason I say slight is because I can generally escape when I need to. Unfortunately, when you're 'dropping the kids off at the pool', it's a little hard to speed around the corner until they've gotten out. I have this rule about insects and bugs: As long as they are not immediately impinging on my comfort zone, I don't go out of my way to kill them. With my pants around my ankles and an arachnid dangling inches from my exposed thigh, I was feeling a little bit pressed. The disturbing thought of that creature touching me qualified as a kill-able offense.

This is where I ran into a dilemma. I couldn't slam it with the Reader's Digest; the angle was just far too awkward. There was no chance of stepping on it or kicking it from under the toilet paper dispenser. No, the creature had found the absolute best possible place to hide from an easy kill. I was relatively certain that it was not poisonous. Most poisonous spiders are built much more athletically than this gangly thing. So I decided to implement plan B: escape at the earliest convenient moment and let the suitemates deal with it. That meant the obvious; finish up and get out. Of course, this introduced a whole new problem. You see, the way that we're wired, you gotta be relaxed to 'drop the bomb'. If you get scared, your bowels shut down in favor of more important functions – you know, heartbeat, blood in the muscles, all that good stuff.
So there I was, leaning as far away from the toilet paper dispenser as possible while the spider under it just kinda wiggled with glee at the silly human who couldn't finish. It must have had no end of amusement, watching me cringe with the silent dread of the horrifying tickle of eight legs crawling along my flesh. The thought of this creature enjoying my discomfort was almost enough to make me reevaluate an attempt to kill it.

But I didn't. And in not doing so, started one of the most unusual relationships I've had this year.

Our cleaning lady's name is Val. She is short (the PC might use the word petite), with rich dark hair and earthen skin marked by the effects of time. I've never seen her hands, but I imagine that under the offensive yellow gloves, they are worn with years of manual labor cleaning up after privileged college students. Her eyes betray the tales of struggle in her life; things like childbirth, illness, injury – struggling to make ends meet. Perhaps with more time and energy, Val would get a story to herself; one that more fully develops her as a person. But in this one, she is just our housekeeper. And, as such, is the one responsible for 'cleaning' our bathroom.

I went into the bathroom shortly after she left it. Everything – the floors, walls, mirrors, and sinks – glistened with the sheen of water. The housekeeping staff has a bizarre way of 'cleaning'. Oftentimes, it involves the spraying of a little bleach here and there before the entire bathroom is hosed down. The pressure from our faucets is high enough to blow a hole through your hand, perfect for a hose attachment – strong enough to push the mildew a little further into the grainy crevasses of our showers and let the white shine through.

At any rate, I was a little heavy from the meal the night before and the morning smoothie added just enough pressure to get things going at the other end. So, while the floors were still wet, I made my way in and locked the door as a warning to my suitemates that I was going to 'blow it up'. As I got to the little alcove that housed our toilet, the memories of my meeting the day before gave me reason to pause and look around.

Is it just me, or is anyone else afraid of a spider crawling up their back while they're trying to take a shit?
Just before I copped a squat, I peered under the toilet paper dispenser. Incredibly, the spider was still there, hanging upside down and looking as asleep as a spider can look. Its presence shocked me. I was so certain that it would be swept out when the housekeeping staff came by.

"Ah, shit," I muttered, looking around with a helpless expression. Good fortune bid that no one was there to hear my crappy pun, but seeing the spider still there really dumped on my day. How was I supposed to 'leave my presents under the tree' if I was being watched?

It's a good thing no one but the government watches you take a shit. How funny would it have been to see someone trying to sit sideways on the toilet seat because they don't want their legs anywhere near a spider? The animal part of me screamed for the creature to die, citing indignity and embarrassment at fearing such a 'squashable' creature. How could this happen? Me, a large human being, cringing away from an eight legged thing weighing less than the package I was dropping off?

The creature only managed to survive by the mercy of my intellect. The little imaginative section of my mind pushed forward the strange posit that the spider deserved to live. Why? Well, simply because it'd managed to evade death this far. Ludicrous as it may seem, I found myself considering this prospect. Against incredible odds, this small, vulnerable spider had managed to find itself a place of haven in the jungle of our bathroom. Not just a place of haven; a place where it was safe from the liquid purging that the dirty tile walls got on a daily basis.

"Yep," I heard my mind say, "that is a pretty smart spider."

"No," I heard a more authoritative mindvoice say, "that is a damn lucky spider."

And that really is what it came down to. The spider's exceptional fortune kept it alive. I knew that there were enough small insects to keep it fed – probably why it set up shop in the first place. But what a place to call home! Once or twice every day, some extremely large creature would come by and leave the nasty logs before getting up and going back to whatever it was they were doing.

Small creatures in the animal kingdom have managed to get by on stealth, skill, and a little luck. That which cannot be seen cannot be attacked – at least in the wild. In letting me see it, the spider had committed a grave natural error, one that could very easily have been deadly. But it chose wisely, if it chose at all. Seeing the spider swinging from its upside down perch, I came to realize that the only true thing that guaranteed its continued existence was my tolerance. Presuming the creature had some semblance of intelligence, it knew that too.

So I didn't bother it. Instead, I dropped my load and let it live to see another day.

I've heard it said that laughter is the best medicine. Unfortunately, like any medicine, it has the potential to be abused. My roommate probably doesn't think it is funny when I began giggling in my sleep, but as long as he doesn't try to escape or call the police, he should be safe enough.

Oh my, how did I get off on that subject? Ahem.

Anyhow, the laughter I was referring to dealt more with my musing about the spider.

In the ten-minute walk I take to get from dorm to class, many thoughts tumble through my mind. I may wonder about my next test, some esoteric point from a class, or about future writing ideas. When the spider appeared in my mental playlist, I thought it was humorous enough to laugh over. Yes, I must have presented an unusual picture to any omniscient being watching me. The heavens rocked with deified laughter each time I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and promptly leaned over to look under the toilet paper dispenser just to see if the little creature was still there.

Two weeks had passed since my awkward discovery of the spider. I still had not named it, nor had I made any attempts to kill it. However, the decision had been made to spare its life, and so no further mental efforts went to plotting the spider's demise. Instead, deep thoughts roiled in my mind next to chemical structures and other tidbits of erudition.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own lives that we don't see the things right under our noses. It is so important to get to the next meeting or read the next homework assignment that we don't notice the beauty in a falling leaf, or the majestic dance of trees as they lean from side to side in the brisk autumn breeze. Instead, we assign these observations an element of cheesiness, calling them juvenile or spacey. I don't advertise my silent joy in these natural wonders, not because I wish to selfishly hold onto them myself, but because they are just that precious. One can find spirituality out of the surroundings, peace amongst the pines, a nurturing touch from nature's transitions.

In finding the spider, I had discovered another of life's small secrets, one that was, for an instant, all my own. This assumption was reasonable, I considered, simply because most people would not hesitate to kill a spider sitting next to them, let alone one so close to their toilet exercises. But who thinks of looking under the toilet paper dispenser on a regular basis? Val, the cleaning lady, had been oblivious for the last two weeks. My suitemates had been oblivious at least that long. My roommate was probably born oblivious. I was the only one that knew about the spider in our bathroom, and somehow that made it special.

Not that I enjoyed taking a shit next to an eight-legged freak, but hey, sometimes life is funny like that.

We'd reached an understanding. No longer did I have to sit sideways while taking care of business. I felt comfortable enough that the spider would do nothing that I could leave logs in peace. Live and let live. It's a philosophy that is wrong on so many levels, but oh so right. All I wanted to do was leave a shit. All it wanted to do was hang there and eat bugs. We had no masterful diplomatic talks. No longwinded essays sung the merits and flaws of our agreement. We needed no treaty as testament to our pact. It was just an unusual arrangement between a human and a spider. Each of us doing our own thing: livin' and letting live.

I remember the afternoon I came home and found the spider missing. I'd locked the door and leaned down to peek under the TP dispenser. Nothing. For a moment, I found myself shocked. The shock quickly led to fright.

"Ah shit–" I muttered, looking around me quickly. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I chastised my explicative as an unamusing pun, but there were more pressing matters now. My immediate reasoning was that the spider had somehow awoken from its four-week slumber and was now prowling the bathroom for food. If it happened to prowl its way onto my flesh at anytime while I was sitting, all agreements were going to be off.

I checked the ceiling and the floor. I leaned forward to peer behind the toilet, even lifting the 'U' shaped seat with the toe of my boot to glance underneath it. The windows got the once over, and the inside of the toilet paper dispenser received a full checkup. Nothing. Nothing at all. It appeared, from my examination, that the spider was gone.

I hesitated a little longer before my bowels became insistent. Spider or no spider, I had to go. And so I went. But halfway through the process I leaned down to peer below the paper dispenser again, just in case I'd missed something. Indeed, I had missed something, but it was not the spider. I noticed that the webbing was gone too, without a trace. Either my spider had packed up his home to move, or he'd been swept away in his sleep.

A sigh of relief escaped me, though it was not solely the propriety of my laxed sphincters. Once again, the bathroom was truly mine to stink up on my alone. There would be no more peeking under the dispenser when I came in; no more gentle tugs on the end of the TP roll to make sure I didn't send the spider into a scrambling, twitching frenzy. No more giggling at night, imagining the panicked screams of my roommate as the spider crawled along his pasty white thigh during a dump.

And then, things took a turn for the bizarre.

I missed it. Despite the embarrassment and the cringing and all the other stuff, I missed my spider. Four weeks had passed since my discovery of the creature and its luck finally ran out. By chance and perhaps accident, Val, or my suitemates had probably discovered the creature and killed it without a second thought. I don't blame them. After all, it was only sheer luck that I didn't come back with a slipper to whack it on the first day. Yes, I missed it, but not in the longing sort of way.

We never talked; never communicated beyond tacit acknowledgment of each other's presence. But there was still significance to our unusual relationship. I've done some of my best thinking in the bathroom, and for four weeks, there was a spider in my thoughts; a spider that had no clue of the peril of where it existed. The creature invaded one of our most sacred places, managing to hide only by the will of a human much larger than it. I could have ruined its web with a breath, ended its life with a smack. But I didn't. And the little creature would never know the depth of my mercy.

I remember walking to class a day after and pausing to look at the blueness of the sky. The clouds were lovely, rich and thick with moisture that signaled no threat of rain. I love it when the weather is that way because I can pretend for an instant that I am back home. My thoughts began to focus in on what was up there – what was out there.

For all I know, some omniscient creature may be observing me each time it takes a shit, waiting for the day that I overstep my bounds to end my life. It became easy to imagine my entire existence as a testament to the tolerance of a greater being who neither cared to see me live nor see me die as long as I didn't disturb his shit. These are the kinds of questions humanity has been asking for years – could they have started with just a little spider?

There were further lessons to be learned, I decided. The spider did not have the capability of understanding the philosophical nature of my decision to let it live. It could not appreciate the many ways in which I could have terminated its existence. All it could do was do what it was built to do: kill bugs and eat them; build a web as a home; live and let live. And I, in my own way am attempting to do that same; using the skills and talents built into – whatever I am – to get somewhere in what passes for existence. Perhaps that is my pact with the greater being. Perhaps that is the only thing keeping me from being a bloodstain on the wall of some giant bathroom.

When I go to drop my loads now, I still check under the toilet paper dispenser. But it is not for any loftier goal than to make sure I don't get any surprises. I'm still not a fan of spiders crawling around me while I'm trying to take a dump, but I found something special there once. I think back on that spider and smile as I quietly observe the world I move through. The relationship was a simple lesson to me, but a poignant one. I'll try to keep my eyes open. After all, who knows where I'll find the next special thing?