There's a bat who lives in my attic, in the house with a room that I rent.
I've named her Hidabat, after a bat in a video game.
Don't ask me what she eats, or anything that she does. I only saw her once, flapping way up top, above the stacks where I keep all my books. My family had to help me move my books when I left my last house, and it wasn't much fun, and I didn't have many people to help, and now there's nobody here but Hidabat.
I joked to my mother that Hidabat is my new pet, but mom didn't think it was funny. "It's a wild animal," she told me, "and it'll bite you on the head."
At night she scratches, scratches, scratches, in the wall behind my bed.
You can get into the walls from the attic, and there's probably lots of bugs. There has to be a reason she stays. She never poops on my books, so she must sleep in the wall most of the time, waking up at 3:00 AM, scratching, scratching, scratching.
I'm usually up around then. I can't get to sleep, even when I'm sleepy.
And when I'm sleepy, I think sometimes that she's asking for help. "I'm stuck," Hidabat says, "I'm stuck, I'm stuck, and I want to get out," but she can't, or she won't, and one day I'll get around to selling more of my books, and being an adult, and finding someone to live with me, here in my bedroom by the attic, and I'll find her lying dead.
Sometimes I think I should let her out: open the door to the attic and have her fly into my bedroom, then chase her down the stairs to the kitchen and out the door to the hall, then down the stairs to the front door then out into the night, and then I'll never hear of her again.
I wish she'd fly away, and find a different home, where there's lots of bugs to eat, and another bat with whom she can mate.
And be a happy bat.
But she scratches, scratches, scratches, always at 3:00 AM.
Oh Hidabat.
I'm just not ready to live with someone else.