La Voz de Galicia – September 21, 2025 →
It was a tiny mosquito, so tiny that even though I could hear its high-pitched frequency, I wasn’t able to see it. It began circling my ear at three in the morning. And when I waved my hand to try to kill it, suddenly it would appear in the other ear. I spent half the night like that, and the other half scratching my ankles, for that minute mosquito left not a single joint unbitten.
I ended up waking Xan, who, half-asleep (and slightly annoyed), switched on the light, grabbed the flyswatter, and waited patiently for it to show up. But it never did. Once we accepted our failure, we decided to go back to sleep. And when I finally managed to fall asleep, the ridiculous sound of that insolent mosquito returned and made the night impossible. Desperate, I waited for the frequency to settle somewhere on my face and, without thinking much, with my hand wide open, I gave myself such a whack that I think I hurt myself. I don’t know whether I killed it. I didn’t have time to find out, because five minutes later, unfortunately, the alarm went off and my sleepless night was over.
Today, perhaps because of the tiredness, it occurred to me that that despicable mosquito is not so different from those thoughts that sometimes, around three or four in the morning, come into my head, wake me with their buzz, and despite my struggling to push them away, I can’t get rid of them. No flyswatter can stop them. Or maybe there is one, it all depends on whether I can turn on the light without waking Xan and return to that book by Marías or Didion or Montaigne, and thus guide my dark thoughts toward those of the writers who illuminate those sleepless nights that, with or without a mosquito, shape my existence.
To kill a mosquito in that situation, hold your pillow above your head at arms’ length. When the skeeter gets between you and the pillow, smush said pillow down on your face. It works.