Fuck you.
That's right, fuck you, and your stupid funny face, and your stupid pointy front tooth, and your stupid face raisin. ( :)! :)! :)! )
I have had THE WEIRDEST FUCKING WEEK OF MY LIFE. So fucking weird. I'm stoned right now- CVS Severe Cold Formula should be sold out of some gross smelly skinny guy with greasy hair's trench coat on the corner of Chicago and Central Avenue. Yesterday was the babysitting day from hell. My uncle paid me $60 for watching his unbelievably bratty children for fourteen hours. I am pretty sure that is not even minimum wage; however I'm so incredibly stoned right now that my 660 points worth of scholastic aptitude in math isn't shining through in the arena of short division. One of the kids made me so mad that I actually had to pick her up and move her around to get her to do what I said, all while she screamed at a decibel loud enough for even my dad to pick up on. My other bratty cousin who I babysit for on weekdays was there, and was obsessed (as usual) with food. What we were going to eat. Where we were going to eat. If that kid got more than her. Why she can't have a piece of cake. Why I won't take her to get Dairy Queen.
By the time I left I wanted to shoot myself, I had a headache, and I was so pissed off that I was so pissed off that I got even more pissed off. I have been thinking in purely intellectual terms how this added daily stress may be affecting my health. That pissed me off.
So I took four CVS Severe Cold Formula, since I have also had the flu since I got home from St. Louis.
Normally I just take the regular dose but I sensed that I really needed whatever taking double was going to do for me. I sat there with a giant frown on my face, with that little kid feeling, where you are so pissed off in that horrible way that makes you want to cry, which pisses you off even more because you don't want to cry, you want to break things or kill someone. Know what I mean? It sucked. I squeezed out a few angry tears while punching the bed before I realized that that feeling was where 99% of this diary came from. I have gotten out of the habit of writing that stuff. But I have started to write a novel in a special $5 notebook I got (and I emphasize $5 because there were notebooks for 7¢ right next to the one I bought, but I refuse to live poverty consciously anymore) and so I thought I'd devote a few pages of actual written word to my angst.
Due to serendipitous timing, as I wrote, the angst began to float away, and so did my symptoms of having the flu, since the medicine started to work. I started feeling better... and better... and better... until all I could think about was how great the world would be if I could just be stoned on CVS Severe Cold and Flu all the time!
Then I got this great idea: I'll do yoga! And OH MY GOD. I did yoga. For like two hours. I had MSNBC on in the background, and the sound was coming in like waves like this: ooOOoooOOOOoooOOOOooOOOOOooOOOOOooo as I did my weird positions. And the best part about it was that whatever the ingredient is in this stuff that is supposed to relieve muscle aches is apparently a muscle relaxer, because I was twisting my body into all sorts of ridiculous shapes I could never do without it. I could fit my head all the way between my knees with my legs straight in front of me. Imagine the possibilities.
Then I slept, but it felt more like I hallucinated- like, my dreams were so much more real than usual- practically the entire rest of the night. I thrashed around in bed and had the most realistic conversation with someone from my past. It was like we were actually sitting there talking- same voice, same mannerisms, everything. It was awesome. And the thoughts communicated during our conversation were healing and freeing somehow, I think. Then again, I am stoned again right now, so I'll have to think about this in the morning.
But the reason my week was so surreal had more to do with one other thing. For the first time in my life, something I love has died and is gone forever. I've lived through symbolic deaths a million times, and contemplated my own and my parents' and my beloved's death a million times, but I never experienced the weirdly hollow feeling of knowing you will never see someone you love again... because they are dead. It was "just" the stray cat that I found when I was five years old in our backyard. She was almost 19 years old. I have two other cats, and I haven't spent very much time at home in the last six years, so I really thought when the day came that she died that I would go, "Aw, Kitty's dead" and feel sort of... I don't know, sad for the sake of preserving history or some shit like that, like when they take down the old fifties style sign from a store and put up a new modern one.
But when I came home on Friday night with fifteen minutes to spare between engagements, I found my mom looking conflicted, and my little kitty sitting on the kitchen floor, propped up on her front paws spinning in circles, trying to walk. For weeks now, my mom has been taking her in and the vet has been giving her intravenous fluids every day because she had appeared dehydrated and was losing weight. We all knew that she would have to be put to sleep sometime soon, because that couldn't go on forever. But Kitty lost more weight and the vet found a tumor in her throat Friday, the real reason for all her problems, and this time the fluids had sunk into her legs and she couldn't walk.
I was caught totally unprepared and totally obligated to leave fifteen minutes after I got this news and I basically just panicked. I looked at Kitty spinning around on the floor, trying to get to her water bowl, and just burst into tears. I went over to her and she gave up, and just rolled over onto her side and looked like nothing was even wrong with her. I petted her and cried and cried and cried. She was purring- all I could think about was the fact that she was purring and it made it all the more heart-wrenching. I moved her water bowl over, and she drank, and I moved her food bowl over, and she ate for the first time in a while, which made my mom feel terrible, I think, because the decision to put her to sleep had already been made- we knew she wasn't getting any better- but eating was a sign she was okay, at least for the moment.
It was horrible. And then my brother came over and sat next to me and petted her, and said "One last kiss from Rick" (she dodged it) and with a smartass smirk cooed "You're going to heaven now." His little baby girl toddled around in the background, so cute and perfect, and walked over to Kitty and made an adorable little "Ah-ah" noise when she saw her. We let her pet Kitty softly and she squealed and made baby delight noises, and it made me cry even more somehow. She's so new, and there's Kitty, so old, a relic from a time when my family could still be described as "nuclear." Sitting there was awful. All I could think about was my family, my old family. The one that lived in that house when I found Kitty. It just fucking hurt. It felt like the symbolic tie binding us together was about to be gone.
It was time for me to go, only fifteen minutes after I found this out, and the feeling that hit me was familiar- me, in shock, unprepared and caught totally by surprise, my heart not having had enough time to comprehend what's happening, suddenly having to step outside myself and force my body to walk away from someone I love for the last time. Wanting so much to turn back around. For this not to be the end, forever, for this not to be the last time we touch, for this not to be the last time I see you. I felt angry and I said something stupid and childish to my mom like, "I'm tired of always being the one who has to be strong, and turn and walk away." I left the little cat lying under the dining room table, my mom lying next to her. I walked away, tunnel vision straight ahead of me to my car, and I didn't look back. It was all sickly familiar. And bizarre, the sort of thing you remember, and don't expect to feel again before you've gotten over the last one.
Now she is buried in the backyard under a pine tree.
When I came home my mom was in the kitchen, and I was so glad she was awake. I had thought that this would be so insignificant, even as I left the house earlier, that when I got home I would have forgotten about it and would jog up the stairs and flip on Chris Matthews and do yoga and feel great as usual. But instead I just felt empty and hollow, all over a little cat I didn't think I even really cared about anymore. In the kitchen, her bowls were already gone, her litter box already thrown away, every trace that there had been a cat there for eighteen years gone. This is our way, our family, when something is gone, we do that. Lee always told me he thought it was weird, that I get rid of evidence. Usually it helps; no reminders. But the absence, of this cat, was everywhere. The whole house felt different. Incomplete.
And my mom looked so sad, because I know she felt the same things, about the weird symbolic severing of the last common tie between all four of us. She looked weary. I thought about how she'd been home all alone as my stepfather left to take Kitty to the vet for the last time. "Kitty is the only person I've lived with consistently for the last eighteen years," she remarked with her sad, stable smile, as we sat there weirdly at the kitchen table.
"I called your father tonight," she said. I was surprised. He couldn't possibly care, except for in the same symbolic way we all did; he's been gone for twelve years. "What did he say?" I asked. "That he was sorry for me," she told me, "and that I did a good job. That was the same thing he said at your brother's high school graduation."
Hearing that made me so sad. She must have been feeling something really weird to call him. They were married for twenty-five years; I can't even imagine. I guess she needed to mark the end of the era, or something.
Anyway, I couldn't believe how much I felt the death of this animal that made up such a small percentage of my day-to-day life. I cried for hours after my mom went to bed. I just couldn't stop. Things didn't feel right, and I felt scared. I felt so hollow knowing that she was buried, it was done, I had seen her for the last time. For the first time ever since my grandfather died, I understood a little bit about what death really meant. When they closed the casket at my grandfather's wake for the last time, I completely freaked out. I was eight years old, and not super close with my grandfather, but when I saw him for the last time a surge of love arose in me and realized fully what it meant that I would never be able to see him again. And I felt that way Friday night as an adult, and I cried and cried. And it was terrible. I felt so vulnerable, like a little kid again, and so scared. I actually almost went into my mother's bedroom and woke her up, like when I was a little kid. I'm glad I got ahold of myself and didn't do that. But it took a lot of strength not to. The experience of feeling that young and unprotected is one I can't remember having ever since I left home. I literally had to ask God for help, out loud, which I never do. A lot of times throughout the day I talk to God, in my mind. I ask "Why am I feeling this way? What is this really about?" or "What am I not seeing? What is the truth?" or "Why is this person annoying me so much?" But that night I had to say it, out loud, "God, please help me."
It was horrible and it had so little to do with the actual fact of the cat being gone. It had to do with change, plain and simple. It was nice sitting with Kitty when she'd jump up on my bed when I stay there, but my sadness was all about old wounds and fear. I let myself mourn again for my idyllic childhood lost. But that hysteria in the dark in the middle of the night was a fear that I never had a real evidence of before, and that is of my family members dying. They're going to. And I don't know what that pain is going to feel like, or what it's going to do to my life, or how I'm going to get through it when it comes. And I laid there imagining that if I felt hollow and strange from a cat dying- and not even one of my beloved cats here in Chicago that I love so so so so much- how would it feel when, specifically, my mom died?
There's no answer.
© beotch at
1:45 a.m.
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