a fly.

During the past few months, I’ve inadvertently distanced myself from multiple people — and vice versa. A lot of times people just outgrow old friends, or get bored. I like to reflect on myself periodically, and I wonder: what’s stopping any of my close friends from getting bored of me?

I try to keep up with what my friends are into. I don’t want to be the one spamming “uh-huh”s and “okay”s every conversation. But even beyond that, I feel like for any relationship to flow, there has to be some kind of interestingness about the person you’re talking to. Some reason to stay curious about them. Something a little unpredictable.

For me, that’s kind of been the throughline my whole life.

Despite being told I have a resting bitch face, or repeatedly being called the “queen of sarcasm” by a friend in 6th grade, I’ve sort of always been… a clown. At first, it was just humor. Then, as life got harder, it shifted into a full-blown comedy of errors. An old friend once said that Murphy’s law is scared of me.

Back in school, every Monday I’d show up with some insane story about the weekend — usually something to do with chess tournaments, because I played a lot back then. Then, the chaos evolved. It started branching out: travel, getting goods from Pineapple King Bakery, grocery errands, even my education (but that’s a story for another day). And now, we’ve reached a new low.

A fly.

For context, I’m currently in Oxford as I’m typing this. I settled on the cheapest housing I could find—because obviously, I’d rather spend my money at Kurisu Omakase or Gymkhana than on place with a fan or some kind of air conditioning. This is all conveniently leaving aside the fact that my plane almost got diverted to Brussels on the way here, or that I basically got scammed by the money transfer company I used to pay for my hotel stay, or that my accommodation has been steadily auditioning for the role of “crumbling infrastructure” in a victorian era drama film.

But overall, I’ve been doing okay, notwithstanding the usual Khyathi problems.

Until a few hours ago. Just as I was about to sleep, a fly started buzzing around my room. There are a lot of spiders here, and I’m fine with that. I’m the same kid who got called out by my English teacher in 9th grade for writing a letter thanking my parents for gifting me a tarantula in an exam paper. I love spiders. But this fly — I knew I couldn’t sleep through it’s arrogant buzz.

Here goes:

Phase 1: Physics

Obviously, the first thing I did was look up videos that claimed to play a sound at a frequency that would kill a fly. It didn’t work.

Phase 2: Containment

I realised I should probably figure out a way to trap the fly, maybe with something like a cup. The closest thing I had nearby was the lid of a face cream jar, so I tried to suffocate it with that, but obviously it was too busy twerking all over the room.

Phase 3: Engineering

I found an empty water bottle from yesterday, filled it with hot water and soap, poked a hole in the cap, and decided I’d spray the fly with it.

At first, I shook it too much, and it was just spraying gas. Nothing was happening.

But then—once I figured out the perfect soap-to-water ratio and stopped overmixing — I got it to actually spray at an angle. I started getting some on the fly, and slowly its speed began to drop.

It kept fighting, flying in my direction in a hope to intimidate me but I stayed put. I then remembered that the fly will likely try sitting where there is light, so I took my soap water mixture and sprayed it all over the lamps nearby. However, the fly (initially) noticed, and stopped sitting on the lamps.

The fly began to slowly fly in circles, getting weaker, and somewhere on the wall, I saw a singular small bloodstain. I was sure it was dying, but I was unsure how and when it would. As I managed to spray it with more soap water, it got delirious enough to seek shelter on a lamp, and then plopped onto my tableside, barely moving.

Phase 4: The End

I took the face cream lid and covered the fly with it. I didn’t want to lift it and find it alive and angry again. So I dipped the edge of the lid in the soap-water mixture, and slid it over the fly, trapping it in a neat little soap tomb.

…Anyway, the entire time I was doing this, there was a voice in my head reminding me of that Kanye tweet where he apologizes for not dropping an album because there’s a bee in the studio — and another voice telling me I was just being ridiculous. That I was making a big deal out of a tiny thing, and most people would’ve just went to sleep or swatted the fly in 2 minutes, or as someone suggested, switch off the lights and leave the room.

But I realised the reason stupid things keep happening to me is because I like stupid, and I would never want to have it another way. So in a sense, I’m writing this to remind myself, the next time I feel like my luck is shitty, that it’s all just for the plot.

Instead of living a calm life, I end up inviting chaos into my life. Don’t blame it on my 7.5 sani and give credit to astrology when I’ve carefully curated these messes.

Perhaps this is what sets me apart to my friends? That I keep treating life like an improv show?

Now please don’t call PETA!