Mosquitoes buzz around my ankles like hummingbirds around nectar. I wear long skirts and repellent lotions and still they kamikaze fly into the chemical haze of my lower extremities and take one last bite. They dance in little fairy rings with their stinging noses sniffing the sweet blood in my veins.

Meals outdoors are a minor disaster for me, while my companion’s sup and dialogue I jiggle and itch and scratch and have to leave meals early, great for my waistline but my social life suffers.

Great red wheals of bites, great soaring fevers as the dengue plague hits my blood, great fear and irregular breathing, panic. I went the route once many years ago, of allowing myself to be bitten and to be present with the experience of mosquito bites. I watched the black suckers on my arm and felt them on my leg and within a few seconds on my eyelid and I went into the routine of the mozzie dance sweeping my limbs with flaying hands and retreating to netted safety.