I have itchy face.

I woke up with a little tic tugging at my eyebrow, rubbed it away, then got up to do the other thing I always have to do when I wake up in the middle of the night: go to the bathroom. The tic came back while I was sitting there, but in the other eyebrow this time. I was rubbing that one out as I tottered back to bed. Everything seemed to be fine as I climbed under the covers and found a comfortable position to fall back to sleep.

A slight, almost imperceptible itch teased at my left cheek. I tried to ignore it, because once you start paying attention to these things they tend to multiply, but it wouldn’t go away so finally I brushed my fingers across it a couple times. I was okay for a couple minutes until the tic came back.

It didn’t really feel like a tic this time. It felt like one of my bug antennas was doing a little hula dance. Over the years a few of the hairs in my eyebrows have mutated from my normal, short eyebrow hairs into freakishly long stalks that tend to stick out and, to make themselves even more pronounced, point slightly upward. I’ll probably end up with Andy Rooney eyebrows, but for now I just have the bug antennas. Weirdly, I seem to be the only one who can’t see them. Well, I can, but not until they look like something growing out of the head of a cockroach. My Darling B often sees them before I do, though. She lets me know when they get too funny-looking so I can get out the hedge clippers and give them a trim. If she doesn’t, and they’re not at least a foot long, then the only time I notice them is when they brush against something, or they do a little twirly-whirly. I’ve never seem them actually twirl, but it feels like that’s what they’re doing, and when they do I’ll grab them with a tweezers and yank them out by the roots because, man, does that bug the crap out of me.

I didn’t want to get out of bed to tweezer my bug hairs so I made do with giving them a good scratch with the end of my fingers, hoping that would settle them down, and for the moment it seemed to. The itch on my cheek came back, though, and after I scratched that, my forehead felt a little itchy, so I scratched that, too.

Then my eyelashes felt like they were tangled. I blinked my eyes a couple times to see if that would untangle them but they still felt tangled. I know they weren’t. I know they only felt tangled and the only real tangling going on was in my head, just like my bug antenna eyebrows weren’t really twirling, but the only thing I could do to make them feel like they were untangled was to rub them with my fingers.

Okay, deep breath. Relax. Back to sleep.

Nope. Felt like there were bugs in my hair. Don’t know here that idea came from. Maybe the “bug” from bug antenna eyebrows. Whatever. I had to scratch that. Can’t ignore bugs in the hair. Can’t make them go away by scratching, either. Scratching only makes it worse. Only napalm gets rid of bugs in the hair, or getting B to shoot me in the face, which she probably wanted to do by that time to stop me from fidgeting. Well, I knew by then I wasn’t going to simply fall back asleep any time soon, so I rolled out of bed and got comfortable on the sofa where I could scratch my head for as long as it took to make all the little tics and itches go away. And drivel. Got to drivel it, or it didn’t happen.