Bookends of heart failure

Yesterday morning as I got into the shower and adjusted the water temperature, I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. Five thoughts simultaneously pasted themselves into my brain:

1. What is that?

2. I should really put my contacts in before showering.

3. Seriously, man…what IS that?

4. Is it a clump of hair? It’s pretty large.

5. Wait, why is it moving away from the water? Toward ME?

6. Where are Decorian and Sati?

I scuttled out of the shower and, walking directly past my glasses on the vanity, went into the bedroom to grab my other pair of glasses (note to self: quit being a baby and just get the LASIK surgery already).

Jason heard me moving around and came to investigate.

“Are you OK?”

“What? Oh yeah, sure. Um…could you please check the shower for me? I will be right over here a comfortable distance away, not looking in the shower.”

So he got the reluctant pleasure of squishing the world’s longest silverfish, which…GOD. I mean, I kill bugs and spiders myself without an ounce of squeamishness, but silverfish make me want to stab my eyes out with a shrimp fork and then take 47 showers.

Showers not infested with silverfish, of course.

Then, last night when I got home from work, Jason was nowhere to be found.

I asked Sunny, “Where’s Marta?” (Because I am one of those people who has conversations with their pets, such as the nightly “Are you dead? Oh no, dead kitty!” conversation, where I do all the talking and Sunny plays dead with one back leg all rigor-mortised in the air.)

I figured Marta was downstairs and started to head down there when I remembered I was still wearing my coat. I then opened the coat closet to see Jason standing there all wide-eyed.

After my long-winded scream (a welcome departure from my usual impulse of shouting the f-word when startled) he said, “I knew the minute I hid in there it was going to end badly. But you should’ve seen your face!! By the way, I almost stuck my toe out from underneath the door so you would know it was me.”

Because that would have been SO MUCH BETTER. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been concerned AT ALL about a giant toe belonging to some unknown person sticking out of my coat closet.