His House His Rules

I'd always heard that people go mad when they're alone in the wilderness.

Not mad exactly — but they start making friends. With animals, with trees, with rocks. The solitude does something to you. Softens the boundaries between what's a companion and what isn't.

I'm not alone. Let me be clear about that. There are people around me, humans in my life, contact with the outside world. But something similar — not the same, similar — has happened anyway.

There is a frog in my bathroom.

Has been for about a month now. Tree frog, technically, but he's made his peace with indoor living. Started small. Has grown now — full size, fully settled, completely unbothered. He sees me come in and doesn't move. Doesn't flee. Just sits there on the tap or the door or the commode, doing whatever frogs do, on his own schedule.

First I was genuinely unsettled. Slimy idiot just sticking to every surface like he owned the place.

Turns out — he does.

Somewhere in the last month it shifted. Now I tell him to move if I need to wash my face. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he doesn't. I ask him if he's alright when I come in at night. I call him Froggy. He knows my face, knows my schedule, knows that I'm not a threat. We have an understanding.

His house. His rules.

Here's what Froggy taught me without meaning to — humans are not solitary creatures. We were never meant to be. When other humans aren't around, or are only sparsely around, we reach. For animals, for trees, for rocks if that's all there is. We will always find a companion. Always. Anyone who tells you they can live alone — truly alone, needing nothing — I'd gently push back on that. You'll find someone. Or something. Even if it's a tree frog who doesn't pay rent.

And that line about hoping humans didn't exist — I've had that thought too. But it's not really about people. It's about the particular arrogance of a species that decided somewhere along the way that they were the point of all this. The universe, the forests, the oceans, the frogs on bathroom walls — all of it somehow in service of us.

No.

We are one small, loud, presumptuous thread in something impossibly large. Froggy knows this. He was here before I arrived and he'll be here after I leave.

His house. His rules.