I thought it was my imagination — the quick, shadowy flash moving from my TV to my sofa.
There was no mouse.
No, surely not.
Calm down.

I went to work for eight hours and then came back into the apartment while making a lot of noise.  [You know, just in case.] I had just exhaled, forgetting the whole thing, when I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye….and there it was: A FUCKING MOUSE.  I shrieked, jumping out of the couch and into the kitchen.

But the mouse?  Totally not phased by my theatrics.  He just kind of lazily trotted to a hiding place.
Oops.  Doot-da-doot-da-doooooo. [He seemed to say.]

I nervously danced around while I dialed my boyfriend.  No answer.  [Of course not.  He was at home playing fucking Guild Wars: Factions with his headphones on because he's a nerd and is obviously not prepared to handle his girlfriend's current mouse crisis.]  So I called , I guess because I knew he had mice in his house before and he’d be able to calm me down. You know what the crazy thing is? I don’t want to kill the little guy.  I just want him to leave.  I’m worried that if Maintenance gets involved, they are going to use poison and then the poor thing will die in the middle of my kitchen or something.

Despite these sentiments, I had to get out of the apartment.  I headed over to Damon’s, because I am in distress, and I am coming over. I get to his door, knock.  No answer.  Knock, knock. Still, nothing.  Knock fucking KNOCK. I go so far as to throw pebbles at his window, which I only managed to do like, twice, because there was a shortage of proper pebbles to throw at one’s window.  More ludicrous yet was the way I talked to his cat, who was meowing on the other side of the door:

“Corona!  Go get Damon! Go get ‘im!”
Which is fantastically ridiculous, Jenn, because cats don’t fetch.

So I left an voicemail so angry and dramatic it probably sounded something like, “Goddamn you, I just got fucking gang-raped in an alley and they fucking beat me to a bloody pulp and stole my purse! I called you and you weren’t there and now I can’t get your attention and I fucking hate you right now!”

…except really, it was something like, “MOUSE! ANGRY! WHY! FUCKING HATE YOU!”
[But in the same tone. Angry Voicemail was followed by Apologetic Voicemail for aforementioned freak out.]

…We also had a mouse in the old house I lived in last summer.  I walked into the kitchen to see something scurry across the floor.  It was probably only a mouse, but I was so frightened that my subconscious exaggerated its size to gargantuan proportions (i.e. POSSUM-SIZED).  I blocked off the kitchen and didn’t go in for days (going so far as to use the neighbor’s bathroom!)  Annie decided that maybe it would be a good idea to name the rodent — maybe it would help us cohabitate with the little guy – at least until we killed it.

“What’s the name of that red-headed kid you hate,” Annie said. ”The one that we always see in the bars?”
“The one that I see everywhere, no matter where I go, even though he’s the last person I want to see?”
“Yeah.”
“Steve.”
“That’s what we will name him.  Steve.”

And thus, the whole mouse/rat/possum issue became a bit more light-hearted.  So maybe that’s what I need to do to cope with this!  I love biblical names for pets.  (I named my last dog Samson, and I decided if I ever got another retriever/lab type dog, I’d name it Moses.)  I’m going to name my mouse Bartholemew.

Okay.

So can I sleep on your couch?