Coward

I’m a coward. Sad as that may sound, it’s the truth and I admit it.

Trying my very best to sleep earlier than my usual 1 o’clock in the morning because I needed to wake up at 5 A.M. for a trip to the Southwestern coast of Cebu with some friends , I found myself tossing and turning, my mind tired but unable to sleep for some reason. A million and one thoughts battled for attention in my mind and the more I tried to push them aside to get me to the peaceful zone needed for sleep, the more and more awake I became.

It must be the coffee that I took mid-afternoon in SM with Jane and Michelle, I thought to myself. I have found that in recent years, any coffee that I take beyond 4 PM was a guarantee that I would be staring at the ceiling the whole night long. But that was only 3 PM, I argued with the voice in my head.

Okay, I’ll just turn on the TV and watch some boring show. I inadvertently switched it on to Bloomberg and there was a discussion on Pharma’s deal with the US government to slash prices of their medicines for senior citizens. It got me interested until I realized, no, that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m supposed to be trying to sleep, so I switched the TV off.

I turned off the bedside lamp and almost immediately, worries about business and things I needed to do for the weekend immediately came rushing into my head, like cockroaches skittering into darkened rooms. I could hear the voice in my head screaming and fighting tooth and nail to push these sleep-depriving thoughts away. Not now, I need to sleep, the voice yelled.

And so I managed to drift into that hazy zone just before sleep and restful oblivion takes over…and then I heard it.

A tap, no three taps on the wall near my head. My eyes flew open, my heart pounding. The voice in my head went “Nah, go back to sleep, it was nothing.” And then I heard it again, somewhere along the wall behind me. I sat bolt upright and switched on the bedside lamp, thinking that like a cockroach, whatever was causing this tapping sound would go into hiding with light illuminating the room. It stopped, for a while at least. I thought maybe it was the aircon and that it was just water dripping outside my window and that the sound just carried to where I was.

I peered into the gap between my bed and the wall for a few minutes, listening intently and heard nothing nor saw anything amiss. I rose from the bed to go to the bathroom and then I heard it again. This time, I heard some rustling noises now, as if something was slithering under my bed.

This I could not take anymore. I switched on all the lights in my room and stared at my rumpled bed, thinking to myself, I’m 43 years old, I’m not a child anymore, there are no monsters underneath my bed.

A voice in my head said, why don’t you move your bed and find out what it is? The other voice said, no way. What if it’s a snake? What are you going to do?

While the two voices were debating, I looked at my watch and saw that it was already 3:36 AM. Too late for me to catch any sleep and besides, the excitement made it impossible to relax. I also didn’t want to lie down in my bed anymore. What if the monster beneath my bed decided to grab me? I wondered then if I was going into second childhood. This is ridiculous, the rational part of me thought.

The coward in me won out and I ended up in the sala with all the lights on, shooting photos with my son’s camera. It’s only an hour or so before I needed to get up anyway, I’ll just kill time.

Then I heard yaya shuffling down the corridor on her way to the bathroom. I waited for her to finish and asked her to come with me to my room. I told her about the sounds I heard and wondered if a snake might have come in. She laughed at the idea. With yaya there, I had the guts now to go down on my hands and knees to check under the bed.

I saw two slippers, from different pairs that I had not been able to use because they were partner-less. I got the one nearest me and could not retrieve the other one because it was too far in. Yaya disappeared and came back a short while later with a broom. She proceeded to pull the bed away from the wall and swept the remaining slipper and some small plastic bits that must have fallen into the back of my bed while I was covering my son’s books and notebooks at the start of the schoolyear.

Then this dark brownish-grey thing jumped near my feet, paused for a nanosecond and then climbed up the wall to hide under the mirror over my bed. Yaya, the fearless one, took a quick look at it and said
“baby gecko”.

I am a coward. I admit it. A baby gecko showed me.