Walking With Spiders
I’ve been walking with spiders all my life. My brothers used to torment me with daddy-long-legs when I was a little girl, flinging them on me and listening to me shriek. As a young teenager I thought I would watch the film “Arachnophobia” to cure my fear. I don’t remember much about the movie, but that night I went up to my room to find large plastic spiders on the floor and hidden in my bed. My brothers got a big kick out of my screams, continuing the prank wars between the three of us growing up together.
The summer after my freshman year in college, I walked in the dark across a wooden bridge covered with spiders over a small lake somewhere in New Jersey to a bench where I told someone that I loved them for the first time. Maybe I should have turned back around the minute I saw those silvery webs in the moonlight, warning me that I might get trapped, stuck, sucked dry of the blood from my rapid heartbeat. I felt really brave then, but was I? The song hadn’t been written yet back in 1999, but as an adult, I’ve heard the band The National play their song “Terrible Love” live at full blast at the end of their shows, singing
It's a terrible love that I'm walking with spiders
It's a terrible love that I'm walking in
It's a terrible love that I'm walking with spiders
It's a terrible love that I'm walking in
It's quiet company, it's quiet company
It was a terrible love. Then it happened.
The August right before my senior year of college, I lost my mind. In my mania, I saw a huge brown spider on the long curtains of the sliding glass doors of my friend’s basement as we gathered together like we did in high school to watch scary movies together. I told one of my friends to yell “Satan, get out!” I don’t remember if she did indeed yell, but the spider started crawling. I got a box for a board game and trapped the spider inside it and put it outside in the dark.
Now, even with my mind intact and my heart unbroken, I am still afraid of spiders. My son relishes this fact and enjoys making me read him nature books about all kinds of insects and especially glossy photographs of big furry tarantulas. I woke up the other morning to find a fake plastic spider on my pillow, thanks to Elliott. Every time he gets a reaction out of me, and every time he asks me, “Why are you so afraid of spiders?”
My husband and I recently went to see a special showing of the film of The Cure’s 40th Anniversary concert in Hyde Park, London on the big screen at the E Street Cinema downtown. At first, the sun was out and shining in Robert Smith’s eyes as they played their hits, beginning with “Plainsong.” By the time the sun went down, the band came into their own, their music better suited for the dark. The backdrop turned into one large glowing spiderweb as they played “Lullaby” off of their album Disintegration. A giant spider crawled across the spiderweb in the darkening night.
On candy stripe legs the Spiderman comes
Softly through the shadow of the evening sun
Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead
Looking for the victim shivering in bed
Searching out fear in the gathering gloom and
Suddenly
A movement in the corner of the room
And there is nothing I can do
When I realize with fright
That the Spiderman is having me for dinner tonight
I shivered in the theatre watching this special effect. I know my fear is irrational. I know the spiders are not real. Yet, I am afraid. I remember hot summer days with spiny legs hitting me on my arms and in my hair. I remember my childhood room with all the angst I held so close in those walls. I remember that night by the lake, losing a piece of myself. These days I love to hear my son giggle as he creeps me out with his books and plastic toys. And I’ll keep going to see The National, singing along with the crowd “It takes an ocean not to break” until I’m hoarse as the lights strobe around me. It’s a terrible love. But I’m walking in it. Every day. Robert Smith’s whispering voice sings,
Don't struggle like that or I will only love you more
For it's much too late to get away or turn on the light
It’s much too late, the lullaby too strong. Yet, I will never stop walking across that bridge to something unknown because as my son says, “You can’t predict the future.” And I think I like to be scared of something that isn’t real, to get shivers at the sight of something terrible, to know that they can’t hurt me. I can only hurt myself. Here, sitting in the dark though, I can always turn on the light.