About A Cat II
7/18: Oh, alive in the throbbing world, everything moving, everything swollen. Feel your heartbeat in the fleshy bits. Skin rubs and reacts. The world is born from something like that, like a recklessness and a touching. It gets serious fast or maybe that’s me. I find time always to laugh. All the ways my body moves through the world and everything it touches along its bumbling path.
When I took Mallory home yesterday, she was drunk - the vet tech’s word. Odd choice of words, I thought. Mallory was afraid to open her mouth after all that unconscious time spent w/ her mouth open, her little body wide open. I try not to think of her like that. I think of the lamb on the spit like I’m still somehow digesting it. Her mouth open as wide as her eyes were then, in the passenger seat squirming in a cage, wanting to trust me again but absolutely changed. I talk to her w/out panic in my voice but nervous still, nervous for her healing, nervous about my brakes.
My cat’s mouth pried open, I saw the photos. They did a good job as far as I could tell, extracting the rotten teeth and sewing up her gums. I had nothing really to hold it up against. I have a reliance on comparison to help me judge where I’m at and where everything else is, sometimes it doesn’t really matter. I was looking mostly at the colors in the swelling anyway. The curious red and purple I’ve always been drawn to. I’m feeling an obsession deepen.
At home, she squirmed still, bumping into walls, confusing the transparent cone for an open window. Window filthy soon w/ drool and blood and soft food. Drunk was a telling word. I watched her unable to relax and fiending for food, circling the room when the door was closed, circling the house when it was open, circling what was familiar in another life, pain and strangeness at home now. Three separate medications, none of which she has any tolerance for but I can sneak them in when she's this hungry. Unlike River, they didn't take all her teeth, not all of her teeth were bad yet. All I can think of is eventuality.
In a couple hours, she is passed out and hardly moving. I lay my head on her little belly to monitor her breathing, to remember her while she's still right here.
Drunk and healing, I recognize my cat across even more lifetimes than before. Watching her, I am already changed. I have been changing but often at an unpredictable pace. I’m learning certain things turn me on and press GO. We all have them, things that tap us in, that set us off, alchemical Now and Then swirling into the present, changing purple, purple w/ some blood in it.
✺
The school bus slows as the children load on and off, watched and worried over. An ant carries one of its own in its mouth, smaller, younger, dead now. The ant is an orange-red, saffron, the color I’ve always carried. My feet in the brown and green. I spend my summer in these colors. When watching Malloy gets to be too much, when there is only so much we can do to help healing along, I go outside to sit in the clover field. The sun wide-mouthed just before 6PM.
I put all of me down in the dirt, in the sun, like returning root-first back into the original mold. I tell my words to go jump in the pool; I need to shut it all out. I want to hear something else for a while. Rallying crows and school street speeds. I think of my therapist on summer vacation (my idea). I remember them telling me of looking for 4-leaf clovers whenever they were out walking. I look around my patch of grass. I comb the Earth’s hair back.
I should have known better but I expected more uniformity. No, no, every leaf unique, flushing different shades of green, growing up and growing around, everyone at their own pace. Uniqueness always but is this not a clover field? Is this not a city? Isn’t this the Northeast coast in the center of July? I lean close and look close. I think of C always finding 4-leaf clovers, pulling up luck all over the place. I don’t find 4 leaves though I dreamed a few, finding two by two tangled into each other, peeping in, and counting the stems when leaves are torn.
I decide against spending all day looking and sitting, sitting terribly. I stretch out, lay back, body in the grass. I laugh like, Watch, I’m crushing my luck. I get the idea to deepen my indent, to lean into the Earth like she asks us to, to search for my luck in the shape of my body, here.
I start looking at the hips, down to the toes and back up, left, right, head, center. I practice patience like I used to do as a child, w/ the sun shining down and sensitive. There is more in the dirt than the clover, but I’m practicing focus too. I’ve been worried about that lately - my eyesight, my aim, my attention.
So I play little games w/ the Earth w/ nothing to lose and I do. I lose. No dice. No prize at the bottom of the box. No 4-leaf clover blooming in the indent of my body. Aside from an hour, I’ve lost nothing. The clock is mine. My body throbbing relentless through time. That’s my business, my life to live.
While clover danced between my fingers, nearly clearheaded and childlike, I hear, LIFE IS ABOUT SEEKING EVEN IF YOU DON’T EXPECT TO FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR. I get a little sad before laughing, laughing out loud w/ the world.
A page I dog-eared from my Nightmares & Morning Pages series ~ thank you for reading