Exactly a week has passed since I arrived back from my time away in Canada, and so much has happened.

I have reptiles, and they’re my responsibility. The idea of leaving for any length of time at all gave me a distinctly uneasy and guilty feeling. I left for nearly four months. Canada was an experience I don’t regret, and I’m glad I went – but it does make me think that, maybe, getting animals that relied on me should have waited until my traveling was done.

Though, really, I didn’t know that I’d be traveling when the homesickness and isolation brought on by COVID at university made me ask a few questions that resulted in companionship in the form of a little corn snake called Azula.

She is the sweetest thing and my first snake. But she is missing. I came home from Canada and began checking on everyone (the snakes, the leopard geckos, the tortoise, tarantula and the fish) and, to my horror, found her vivarium empty.

My parents were looking after my animals and, up until that point, everything had been going fine and there was no cause for concern. It’s still a mystery how she got out, but the guilty admission seems to be that of human error and of leaving the glass doors open at some point.

I had a full on panic attack when I realised she was missing; the tears; the hyperventilating; the inability to think rationally in the heat of the moment; and the encompassing guilt that encroached on my joy of just being home.

Mum snapped some sense into me, and we began to create a plan of action: upstairs got completely turned upside down in the mad search, and it looked like a bomb had gone off in contained rooms as we cleared floor space. The spare room wasn’t so spare any more and the downstairs bathroom became an impromptu storage cupboard. A mess began accumulating on surfaces in my bedroom as we tried to keep the floors clear so that we could see if Azula made an appearance.

It was chaos. And I tried to keep on a happy and optimistic front even though I was feeling guilty and anxious about the outcome; snakes could go missing for months, if not years, and I’d have hated to condemn her to starvation or freezing to death as the cold weather of winter began creeping in…

When she finally made an appearance – unhelpfully when I was out of the house – she manged to escape from my parents in their attempt to capture her gently and safely.

But – we know where she is now. She’s in the floorboards, and every night since she showed herself (on the 7th of October, 2023), we’ve been staking out the bathroom.

We run the bath water hot, and let it steam the room. We let the humidity sit and spread, creating a warm and cosy spot for Azula.

And we wait.

I write this sitting at the top of the stairs. It’s ‘bathroom stakeout: day two’. The floor is hard and uncomfortable, and my back is stiff from the lack of support. But I will out-stubborn this snake.

And so, we wait.