The bathroom is bugged

Tiny, 1/16 inch beetle-like bugs appear in our bathroom.

They're little black spots on the wall, but they're still bugs and I dislike bugs inside the house.

 

I do not know where they come from but a few years ago the husband decided to change the trim on the house, starting with our bathroom. He ripped off some of the baseboards, finished gorgeous new woodwork around the inside door, complete with rosettes that match the trim on the laundry room. He intended to take out the old shower stall and put in a larger one, but that meant taking down a wall and it never got done.

What was left was a gap in some of the baseboards in some places, not all. Bugs this small could easily get through from the floor joists, the inner wall, the empty space above the rooms. I don't know. I do think, however, that these bugs originate somewhere near the floor.

 

I usually find them making their way slowly up the wall before I squish them in a tissue and give them a burial at sea.

 

The other day, however, I saw one clinging to the wall over the mirror, approximately a foot over my head.

 

I don't know what they eat. Dust? Skin flakes? Wallboard? Paint?

 

Whatever they do eat, they don't do well with it.

 

Here's the weird thing: those that reach the highest, die.

 

They do all that climbing, aiming toward the ceiling, and they don't make it.

 

There's something allegorical, something fabulous, something perhaps even gothic but definitely religious in all this. They aim so high, they struggle, they defy random tissue attacks to reach nearly the top, but they never reach their goal.

 

They work hard.

 

They strive for something so difficult.

 

They never make it.

 

Now, I wonder if they realize in their tiny bug brains that their goal is unobtainable, or whether they exhaust their strength and desire, or perhaps this is a suicide run.

 

Their destiny is to almost make it to the top and die trying.

 

Sounds familiar.