Sometimes there are spiders in my eyes. I see the black shapes skittering across my vision, prompting me to turn, ready to leap away from the foul creature before it got too close. But they aren’t there, they aren’t scurrying across the grey fabric of my hand-made couch. They aren’t pressing their small legs against the buttons I glued on with my best friend. They aren’t in my house.

They’re in me.

I started seeing them more about two years ago while I was working. I would see them sprinting like marathon workers across the metal surface of my workspace, lunging towards the other side where they could hide beneath bins or leap to the ground several feet below. There, they would be lost amidst the black dust produced from my work of cutting, sanding, and polishing kydex. The plastic on the floor would hide them. And I wouldn’t discover them again until they were crawling up my leg.

Each time I would turn in a panic, until the frequency gave me pause. I had turned four times in the past hour, believing an arachnid was out to escape somewhere in the shop, only to repel down from the ceiling and latch onto my face when I wasn’t looking. At first I thought it was because something was in my eye, but after a few blinks, it was obvious this was not the case. Then a different idea came to me: I am afraid of spiders, and my demons know that.

The fear that my demons were somehow sticking eight-legged nightmares into my eyes sent shivers down my spine. I stood atop the cushioned mat that protected my weak ankles from the cement floor underneath, my hands in protective gloves which rested near my heat press. Could demons do that? Could demons dip their pinkies into black ink and tap their nail against my iris? Drag it over my pupil, force me to jolt and jerk, stumble away from what was not there?

I prayed about it. Prayed that whatever this was, it would go away. I didn’t need spiders inside me, running amok while I worked with machinery that could easily cut my arm off. I stayed focused on my job, kept my head down, forcibly slowed down my response time to strange objects running around in the interior of my eye. The frequency of their appearances slowed, but they never left me. And neither did my demons.

Yesterday, I asked myself what the point was of writing. I grew in my experience from publishing my first book, enough that a year later, I could look inside its pages and find faults and issues. I told myself this would be expected, and that’s why I couldn’t read the book after it was published. It would only cause me pain. It would only make me believe there was no point moving forward if I already mishandled my first step.

A spider joined me in my doubts. It sat atop my eye, situated comfortably in the corner. It watched me have these doubts, watched me scroll through six years of work and complain about myself to myself. But it grew tired of my self-pitying, my self-loathing, and it took a deep breath, got into a runner’s stance, and sprinted over my eye. And on cue, I tore my gaze from my book and looked to my left, to where the couch I made was, to where my hard work had created a place for me to rest and feel safe, to where my friend had drawn art and plastered it to the wall I erected. My spider vanished as soon as my eyes shifted, eradicated from life, destroyed so that, for a moment, I wasn’t looking at my faults. I was looking at what I had made, what I had created. Not everything was perfect in my house, built with my two hands, my blood staining various wooden beams. One of the wall panels was crooked, another didn’t line up perfectly with its neighbor, some insulation poked out from beneath the rafters that still needed to be covered. There were issues. But it was still mine. And I was proud of it.

I turned back to my book. My thumb touched the corner of my laptop’s screen and a deep breath escaped my lungs. It had issues. But I was proud of it.