The story of our home invasion (and my worst nightmare)

Plus: things that made me chuckle this week

At 11:21pm on Saturday, an intruder entered our AirBnb in Vietnam. I woke up to the unmistakable sound of someone shuffling around in our kitchen. My partner, Uri, often comes to bed later than me, but he was right next to me in bed, and he too had just woken up from the noise. 

“Do you hear that?” I whispered, my heart pounding out of my chest.

“Yea,” he replied, throwing back the blankets and reaching for his phone.

He turned the flashlight on and went to the bedroom door, naked, to poke his head into the hallway for a closer listen. 

I took a deep breath to try to steady my shaking hands and gather strength in my weak legs as I reached for my phone to check the baby monitor. With the white noise machine on, I knew my 20 month-old son would still be asleep. I lay in bed and spent the next two seconds mentally rehearsing my options. It was either sneak down the hallway into his room, try to transfer him from his crib into the safety of my arms without waking him up, tiptoe together back to my room, out onto the balcony, somehow scale our way down to the ground, then run away in my bare feet. That or run, snatch, run, jump, pray. 

I knew what it was to wake up from a pleasant dream to my worst nightmare. Ten years prior, after an uneventful night in New York, I woke up to the horror of a man barging his way into my room--the door to which had an ancient knob that didn’t turn, so literally, he shouldered his way in as if he was the NYPD executing a search warrant. I shot upright, eyes wide open, to the image of him stumbling towards me, fiddling with his belt. 

“What are you doing.” I said. It was not so much a question as an accusation.

No answer.

“What the fuck are you doing.” I repeated, with a little more urgency, as he practically fell beside me into the squeaky twin bed Columbia Housing provided its student tenants. 

It couldn’t have taken him more than three seconds from the time he invaded my space until the time he made physical contact with me, but my senses were so heightened I could have sniffed out a needle in a haystack. I could see in the dark. I could hear from the hush of Broadway outside the window at my head that it was sometime between 3 and 4am and there would be no one outside to help me. I could smell a lot of alcohol on this man’s breath. And I could hear the buckle of his belt coming undone. I could feel the blood draining from my cheeks and limbs and my heart working three times harder to pump it all to my brain. I was ready for a fight.

If I was the type of person to own and operate a gun, I would have had the wherewithal to fish it from my nightstand to shoot this man. But I was the type of person who didn’t even trust her own vocal chords to scream for help. My instinct, for better or worse, was to freeze.

What happened after those three seconds could have changed my life. But in the fourth, frozen second I sensed something else. I would survive my worst nightmare. My life wasn’t about to change; this was just one big misunderstanding.

The intruder was my roommate’s friendly, utterly harmless, and totally wasted friend. He was so drunk it was a wonder he was walking at all. She brought him to our apartment at 3am because she didn’t trust he would be ok to go home alone. While she went to get ready for bed, he went looking for a bathroom and that’s when he fell into my room. 

I was hoping for a similar misunderstanding when Uri came back to bed four seconds after jumping out of it. 

“What’s happening?” I asked, my steady voice and prone position betraying my pounding heart and racing thoughts. I knew what I heard came from inside the house, and not from some appliance or quirk of the AirBnb. But I also knew he was not the type to freeze, especially not with our son in potential danger. 

“It’s just a beetle.” He replied.

“What!” I said, impossible a beetle could make that much noise.

“Yea, a really big one, like the size of my ear.”

This should have come as a relief, but amazingly, a part of me still wanted to execute the part of my scheme that involved scooping my baby up and running away. How could either of us expect to sleep in a house infested with bugs the size of his ears?! 

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“But what if it gets into potato's room?”

“I grew up with these beetles, trust me, they’re harmless.”

He pulled out his laptop to work off the adrenaline rush, while I lay awake and thought of that night in New York when I last went through such a jolt.

Both nights, I felt extremely relieved that my worst nightmare didn’t become a reality, and guilty that so many in this world don’t have that same fortune.

Then, my feelings shifted to a sense of wonder that this giant beetle is alive at all.

Because I have been spending most of my time researching and writing about bugs lately, I can’t help but think about how often we humans are their worst nightmare. Invading their homes; declaring war on their babies; investing in middle of the night eradication campaigns; killing them without a second thought.

I know what you’re thinking; I’ve moved abroad and gone full granola. Don’t worry, I still hate knowing that a giant beetle could be lurking just outside my door (as if they, and all the ‘things’ I’m afraid of, aren’t always). One morning, I turned around and saw a (harmless) huntsman spider the size of my hand next to my son’s head and I thought I would die. I will still kill any mosquito that I find in his room. BUT! I don’t think it hurts to try to extend some empathy to these insects.

If we can learn to suspend our judgment of beetles, no matter how big and scary, maybe, just maybe!, we can figure out how to get along¹.

Because I’m a recluse these days, I basically only laugh to myself, about myself. Here’s what made me chuckle this week:

• I find myself quite counterintuitively more stressed about money here in Vietnam than when I was in NYC, even though my costs are ~1/6th of what they were. I think it’s because the expenditures on basic necessities like shelter and food are so exorbitant in New York, you kinda have to just numb yourself to it if you want to live there.

• I’m writing a book that is essentially about freedom, but my writing is not only so much better with the constraint of making each chapter about a specific pollinator, it’s also a more enjoyable process! Go figure. (In other funny twists: the book is also about how we can’t control nature, including our own, and lo and behold, this rebellious book is truly taking on a life of its own!!)

• I thought that when I got full-time childcare, I’d be swimming in so much time, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I dreamed of all the things I would do once we finally got to South East Asia. Things like:

  • 1. Become a regular pickle ball player.

  • 2. I heard that the brilliant Yuval Noah Harari meditates two hours daily so I was determined to do the same.

  • 3. Take local language and cooking classes

• Four months of full-time daycare later, well, I can say hi, thank you, bye, and sorry in Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese. That’s something right?

The culprit. Uri captured it to show me in the morning. Don’t ask me how this thing made as much noise as a human rummaging in our kitchen, it just did ok!

1. Can you tell that personality tests label me a “mediator”?! lol