Tonight, my best friend and I were casually sitting in my living room, recapping our days, when a mouse* ran across the living room floor.

Neither of us have ever been so terrified. Ever. We both sat there paralyzed on our chairs for a solid three minutes saying (screaming) “What do we do? We can’t move, we can’t stay! We can’t move, we can’t stay!”

Then we started calmly but quickly leaving the house, at which point the mouse started CHASING US DOWN THE STAIRS. Okay, maybe it wasn’t sentient enough to chase us. But it was following us. It was getting closer and closer and we couldn’t get the door open, and we were just running in circles and screaming and we got out JUST before it got to us.

It was like an actual horror movie.
So then, panicked, with no idea what to do, we drove to the library to find our friends who were still hard at work making a (gorgeous) newspaper.
Along the way, we proceeded to almost pull muscles we were so stressed out, replace average words with “mouse” (“Did you bring the Arbor Mouse with you?”) and jump every. single. time we saw a leaf skitter across the road.
Once we got to the library, our friend took a picture of us hyperventilating. Because I am a good person who lacks basic self-interest, I am sharing it with the internet:

Enjoy. And next time you think you’re incapable of handling scary situations, just remember us. You’ll feel ten times more competent in comparison.

*Note: Later in the night, we decided to name the mouse David Carr, after our favorite New York Times reporter. Because if we were in the middle of an interview for an internship at the NYT media desk and we saw a mouse — that’s the one situation where we’d be able to pull it together. Here’s hoping it works, as I am now back at my terrifying horror-filled mouse house.