The Virgin Suicides

At 5pm on Tuesday I'm at Pestbusters, finally meeting Peggy who is the singaporean equivalent of Janine from the Ghostbuster movies. She'd insisted I'd come round with the specimens (in spite of me sending pictures) and introduces me to her 'ops guy' Afendi - who would be played by Lawrence Fishburne if there ever were a Pestbusters movie.

Afendi and his colleagues sit around in their overalls put their pencils down and chuckle at the jam jar and it's inhabitants. I can't tell if they're laughing at me or them. Finally he walks over to where I'm seated beneath a giant fiber glass mosquito, and smiles gently.

"So, I'm pretty sure these are dry wood termites" thats not good "quite unlike their cousins the subterranean termite" he points at a giant fibre glass model of a fierce looking white termite mounted above his desk. Ok. "See this door here?" He kicks a heavy wooden door, "subterranean termites could eat through this in ... a week? Maybe days?" mmhmm "These guys?" he shakes my jar and cocks his head to one side "I'd say... 2 years." he hands them back to me in a hey! presto! moment "so don't worry you've got time!" he says returning to a smile.

I'm contemplating burning just my wooden bed and study table. My whole place is made of wood. Fuck. 

They'd just appeared one night. I finished work late and returned to find my room crawling with 100s of these long abdomened bugs crawling across the floor of my room. I thought they were ants at first but then they seemed too weak to even pull themselves up the walls. There was no distinct trail but I found a pile of little beige pallets under the study table, so I crammed all the pallets and about 20 of them into a jam jar and hadn't stopped googling or squishing termites.

Afendi's now a little puzzled. He strokes his chin for a significant amount of time before he comes up with a hypothesis:

Female termites leave their nests every season in huge swarms to find mates and become queens, a heavy storm must have blown them into my room. They must have tried their best to get by (the study table), but after several days of not finding any mates, got severely distressed and disorientated, and without the colony to fend and forage for them, they wilted, losing their energy and appetites, and thus not being able to even climb up a wall.

I was skeptical. But when I returned that evening I couldn't find anything resembling a termite. No pallets, no holes, nothing slowly struggling to get up a wall.

Just some wings, a few dried up husks and an acute sense of loneliness.