There is a highly distracting spider living on my computer monitor right now. I saw him there yesterday and my first instinct was to kill him. He was so cute, though, with his long legs and delicate movements, so I just let him stay on the monitor. We just put away all of our Halloween stuff, part of which is a large array of adorable black spiders who laugh at you when you are a little too loud. This spider is brown and tiny and would never deign to laugh at me if I fell while I was playing DDR. I just didn’t have the heart to kill him and I didn’t have the heart to put him outside, where he’d die because of the cold.

So, I have been cohabitating with this spider for two days now. I pretty much expected him to hide away or leave the monitor, but he’s still here. He takes periodic turns about the top of the monitor every few hours, but mostly he stays near the middle of the screen at the top. Right now, he’s facing the screen, watching my words appear magically. Maybe he’s interested because I’m writing about him.

I guess I’m just surprised that he isn’t dead yet. I have no idea what the lifespan of a tiny brown spider is. I have no idea what he could possibly eat here in my pristine office. There are no bugs or mites or any tasty bits for him. He hasn’t built a web to capture anything. What is he doing here and how is he surviving?

I tried to take a picture of him, but the camera won’t focus on his minute body. He let me hold a ruler up to him. Including legs, he’s almost half an inch long, but his body is just a sixteenth of an inch. I guess I should be measuring him in millimeters to be more accurate, but he has been gracious enough to hold still for me, so I’m not pushing it.

It’s Ebenezer Scrooge cold here in the office, so I suspect he likes my monitor because it’s warm. I wish that it was warm enough for me to heat up hands by it. My fingers are having a hard time typing well today because they are stiff with the cold. I’m just wearing my coat to heat myself up, but it’s hard to type with gloves.

Yesterday, when I was eating my lunch at my desk, he surprised me. I had left my Bombay Potatoes cooling in front of the monitor. I saw him move and for an instant, I imagined him lowering himself into my food. I moved the dish to the side. I definitely don’t want to eat my new diminutive friend.

He hadn’t moved for so long that I was starting to worry that he was coming to my nice, warm monitor to die. If that’s the case, he’s not dead yet. I blew a gentle breath of air on him and he fidgeted enough to prove his state of animation.

I don’t know what it means to purposefully cohabit with a spider. I come from a big family of people who either kill them on sight or put them outside. Letting them live with me isn’t a new experience. I remember the lecture from my dad when I was about four years old admonishing spiders and I remember the polar opposite lecture when I stomped on a spider out of mindless instinct at age seven. After that, I decided that my dad was nuts and I was going to kill the scary ones and cohabitate with the not so scary ones. Sometimes I put them out of the house so that the cats don’t eat them, but I mostly just let them be.