I am an anxious houseguest and passenger
Here is abridged list of my troubles, which selfishly I hope you might also experience
Upon entering someone else’s house, first there is the smell.
If it’s particularly pungent, I will worry about my ability to tolerate such pungency for the duration of my visit.
I will also worry, in turn, about what MY house smells like to visitors, and will worry about the type of wax in the candles that I burn and whether it’s that carcinogenic type.
Then, when the point comes that I am offered a beverage, I will descend into a gentle but forceful internal panic – I drink neither tea, nor coffee, nor alcohol. I don’t like *other people’s* tap water (more on that later) and so unless I know the person well enough to ask for fresh orange juice or a can of something, I will sit, liquidless, until I get to leave and/or perish with thirst.
If there’s FOOD on the agenda, well deary me.
First I’ll worry about the sanitisation of the kitchen, its utensils and counters, and the plate on which I might be served. I’ll wonder what temperature they keep their fridge at, and whether they know you can’t reheat rice safely or not.
I’ll then be consumed with the ‘cookedness’ of everything – is that chicken a tiny bit pink or is it the lighting? Is that burger cooked through? Are those prawns fresh or frozen? I’ll stick rigidly to the foods I deem ‘safe’, which often leads to an embarrassingly full plate at the end of any meal, sometimes resulting in me having to make up stomach issues or digestive problems that don’t exist.
Don’t even get me STARTED on eating outdoors. The flies? Are we well protected? I cannot eat the top layer of those delicious looking salads, I’m afraid.
Then comes… Sleeping over. If I’m an overnight guest in anything other than a hotel, more fears roll in. Such as: What if I wake in the middle of the night to use the loo and someone sees that I don’t wear pyjama bottoms to bed? What if I get REALLY hot or REALLY cold? What if there’s an alarm on the house and I can’t open the window and I start to run out of OXYGEN?
INTERJECTION: It’s a total pleasure living inside my head, might I just say.
Will the pillows be firm or feathery, and what if they’re feathery and make me sneeze, thus disturbing the house’s occupants? WHAT TYPE OF TOOTHPASTE DO THEY HAVE?
I will also worry about the state in which I leave the house upon departure: I want whoever accommodated me to think fondly of my stay, recalling how neatly I remade the bed, and how I Left No Trace like someone haunted by the Litter Lout lessons of their past.
I’m also a terrible passenger, but that tale makes slightly more sense than my unfathomably strange houseguest anxieties.
I was in a car accident in 2018 which caused me to, all of a sudden, become a terrible passenger.