In that instant, Blanche Dubois

Source

Saturday’s baseball game was more than just a game.

89 degrees and sunny. The only saving grace was a slight breeze that came and went. When it went, we got a muggy reminder of just how hot it was.

Our job was to watch the game and cheer for our team. Our voices hung heavy in the air thick with moisture as we made polite conversation before the game began.

Here’s how it works: We arrive about an hour before game time. Another game is in progress. Their fans occupy the best viewing spots. After the game, they vacate quickly and we take their spots or move our chairs into position so we can get a good view without blocking anyone.

To position your chair before the earlier game is over constitutes a punishable offense. Please refrain or face the wrath of enthusiastic and over-scheduled team parents. You know what they do to subversives, don’t you?

As sweat trickled down my back, I regretted insisting that Sophie come with me to the game. She’d made it clear on many occasions that she has no interest in watching baseball, not even (or maybe especially) when her brother plays.

She fanned herself with a card she was using as a bookmark. Her face turned pink under the fuming sun. My skin prickled from the heat and I looked longingly at the University of Georgia canopy shading some of the parents on the bleachers.

“We should have brought parasols,” I whined.

“We’re not really Southern. We don’t have parasols. We have umbrellas,” Sophie snapped.

This was going to be a fun afternoon for sure.

The current game ended right on time. The fans stood and stretched.

One of our team mamas joked that they could leave the canopy for us.

“You can have it for five dollars,” one of the guys joked back.

That seemed more than reasonable to me.

The joking went back and forth. The price rose to ten dollars. Still reasonable!

“Actually, it’s not even mine to sell,” the man finally admitted. “It’s his.” He pointed to another man who was returning from the restroom.

“I just sold your tent to these gals for ten dollars,” he said to the owner.

The owner paused for a second and considered us.

“Hey, you can use it. If you can get it to us by five o’clock at East Paulding High School, you’re welcome to borrow it.”

“Really?” East Paulding is on our way home.

“Sure. Why not?” He smiled.

Why not indeed? I know people (maybe I’m one) who could give you twenty-three reasons why you don’t leave expensive equipment with a bunch of strangers you might never see again, except he sees us all the time at these games.

We thanked him profusely as he told us how to take the canopy down, pointed out the collapsible wagon for transporting it and exchanged phone numbers with me.

Many times throughout the game, those of us enjoying the shade remarked at his kindness and generosity. It was easily ten degrees cooler under the canopy.

Even Sophie had a good time.

Our game ended early and we got the tent back to its owner well before he needed it at 5:00. I thanked him again and he acted like it was nothing. His act of kindness was no big deal.

It was a very big deal to those of us who would have been puddling in the sun.

When is the last time you were the giver or receiver of some act of kindness?

In that instant, Blanche Dubois

Source

Saturday’s baseball game was more than just a game.

89 degrees and sunny. The only saving grace was a slight breeze that came and went. When it went, we got a muggy reminder of just how hot it was.

Our job was to watch the game and cheer for our team. Our voices hung heavy in the air thick with moisture as we made polite conversation before the game began.

Here’s how it works: We arrive about an hour before game time. Another game is in progress. Their fans occupy the best viewing spots. After the game, they vacate quickly and we take their spots or move our chairs into position so we can get a good view without blocking anyone.

To position your chair before the earlier game is over constitutes a punishable offense. Please refrain or face the wrath of enthusiastic and over-scheduled team parents. You know what they do to subversives, don’t you?

As sweat trickled down my back, I regretted insisting that Sophie come with me to the game. She’d made it clear on many occasions that she has no interest in watching baseball, not even (or maybe especially) when her brother plays.

She fanned herself with a card she was using as a bookmark. Her face turned pink under the fuming sun. My skin prickled from the heat and I looked longingly at the University of Georgia canopy shading some of the parents on the bleachers.

“We should have brought parasols,” I whined.

“We’re not really Southern. We don’t have parasols. We have umbrellas,” Sophie snapped.

This was going to be a fun afternoon for sure.

The current game ended right on time. The fans stood and stretched.

One of our team mamas joked that they could leave the canopy for us.

“You can have it for five dollars,” one of the guys joked back.

That seemed more than reasonable to me.

The joking went back and forth. The price rose to ten dollars. Still reasonable!

“Actually, it’s not even mine to sell,” the man finally admitted. “It’s his.” He pointed to another man who was returning from the restroom.

“I just sold your tent to these gals for ten dollars,” he said to the owner.

The owner paused for a second and considered us.

“Hey, you can use it. If you can get it to us by five o’clock at East Paulding High School, you’re welcome to borrow it.”

“Really?” East Paulding is on our way home.

“Sure. Why not?” He smiled.

Why not indeed? I know people (maybe I’m one) who could give you twenty-three reasons why you don’t leave expensive equipment with a bunch of strangers you might never see again, except he sees us all the time at these games.

We thanked him profusely as he told us how to take the canopy down, pointed out the collapsible wagon for transporting it and exchanged phone numbers with me.

Many times throughout the game, those of us enjoying the shade remarked at his kindness and generosity. It was easily ten degrees cooler under the canopy.

Even Sophie had a good time.

Our game ended early and we got the tent back to its owner well before he needed it at 5:00. I thanked him again and he acted like it was nothing. His act of kindness was no big deal.

It was a very big deal to those of us who would have been puddling in the sun.

When is the last time you were the giver or receiver of some act of kindness?

You think you’re one a special breed, Part Three

Continued from here.

I don’t want to reach. Or push. I enjoy this lack of angst. This calm. Things that would have caused me major emotional upsets a few months ago now glance off me like I’m wearing armor.

Another friend, another conversation. This time about love and commitment. About freedom and recognizing your limitations. Like when you’re good at the front end of a relationship, but fizzle when the expectations become too much and people get hurt. About being honest with yourself and with potential lovers. About how understandings crumble.

It doesn’t matter what a woman says. She wants to be the one who makes you want to change. She has to believe she’s special. If you can’t quit the habit of getting in, then you have to be braced for what comes with getting out. And maybe you care too much or you don’t care enough. Either way, you’re caught in the ripple of emotion. It’s unavoidable.

We want. We want. We want – what?

There’s never a good time to break someone’s heart.

I remember, but I can’t recover the feeling. The broken heart. The suffering and self-loathing. It’s out of reach. Maybe it’s the anti-depressants. Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s an unremembered blow to the head.

I’m reading Augusten Burroughs‘ This Is How – Help for the Self, Proven Aid in Overcoming

Shyness, Grief, Molestation, Disease, Fatness, Lushery, Spinsterhood, Decrepitude, & More

For Young and Old Alike. In the first three essays alone, Burroughs writes of letting yourself feel your feelings and calling them what they are. Anger, fear, hate, pain, joy, happiness, love.

Burroughs nails that self-help trope affirmation to the wall with one word. Bullshit. He beseeches the reader to stop lying to herself/himself and to others. If you’ve pasted on a smile for the benefit of others, Burroughs wants you to wipe that fucking smile from your face. It’s doing more harm than good.

He, too, speaks of long marriages.

Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grow into a brittle barnacle of hatred.

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

Raise your hand if you’ve seen that phrase play out. The pebble in the shoe becomes a boulder you can’t leapfrog, can’t quite ignore, can’t quite wish away.

Okay, hands down.

During my dreadful commute, I’m listening to Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays Farther Away. In it, he recounts his 2011 commencement address at Kenyon College titled Pain Won’t Kill You. He also writes of his friend David Foster Wallace who, he concludes, was bored and thus suicidal. I’m being facile, of course. But that’s the gist. Enough of it, at least. His point in both essays is that we have to experience our feelings because the alternative is what?

Numbness? Zombie-like calm? (I just typed clam instead of calm. Zombie Clams from the Zen Zone – a recipe for life as a reformed rager. This could be the title of what I don’t do next.)

What is this? A conspiracy of library books? Franzen and Burroughs – pushers of feelings. The bastards.

Here I sit all counter-intuitive wearing all black on a sunny day. But my toenails are painted purple. There may be hope for me yet, Doctor Freud.

Mustering all the hypocrisy I could, I gave each of the children the “Your feelings of sadness are natural in a time of grief”speech. I took the day off work and spent time with Sophie who’d watched as Morris was born during hurricane season 2004. Now she’d experience his death. We cried together and talked about what we could have done differently to have perhaps saved him. We didn’t know how sick he was. We pulled on our matching mother/daughter hairshirts and left the house to find something to keep Sophie busy.

When we reached the ice cream eating stage of grief, we finally indulged in some lighter thoughts. We laughed about Morris’s kookier habits. How he was so spoiled as a kitten that he never learned to cover his leavings. The three older cats did it for him. How he didn’t say much, but when he did, he spoke with an earnestness unusual to ginger tabbies who are typically wisecrackers. How he would trap the kids under his bulk and breathe in their faces.

When we started to cover the self-blaming territory again, I told Sophie we’d have to knock it off or I’d be in a corner cutting myself. She wiped away the one tear that slipped down her lashes and announced “I’m never having pets when I’m an adult. This hurts too much.”

I pushed the hair back from her face, touched her soft cheek and felt it still damp. Her deep brown eyes were so sad. This is her first real loss. It almost feels like my own first real loss. As another friend put it, “The death of a cat who is like family hits you harder than the death of some family members because they’re more a part of your every day life.”

I finally allowed myself to feel the pain, too. To point at it and think what I’d been holding back. I wanted my fluffy boy back.  I wanted to walk through the door and see him on the silver metal table and say “Hey, bud.” I wanted to see him waddle quickly across the room as Nathan called him Tub Tub. I wanted to see him make the great leap onto the dining room table only to slide to the other end and come skidding to a stop just in time.

Most of all, I wanted another day so we could see sooner that he was critical. I wanted another day to save him.

I suddenly wanted to rant and rave and kick something across the room. Break glass, beat my fists and let out the sobs I’ve choked back for days. Not the silent tears I hadn’t been able to control, but the heavy, heaving sobs that make your head ache and wear you out. Those I’d been able to control. Funny how that works.

Instead, I took a deep breath, popped what was left of my ice cream cone into my mouth and savored the crunch of it. I looked at Sophie’s bowed head, her hands folded together as if in prayer, but I knew she wasn’t praying. Earlier in the day, she’d told me how she wished she could really believe in god and heaven so that she could imagine Morris somewhere besides just gone.

The sun was blotted out by a cloud and she gave a little shudder. In front of her, her cup of Superman ice cream melted into a tie-dyed puddle. I reached out and she took my hand.

Love and pain. Forever linked.

That’s what she said

It’s not exactly a monologue, but there’s plenty of vagina.

That’s what she said at PoliTits, a new post at an old blog.

You think you’re one of a special breed, Part two

Continued from here.

Last night I dreamed I was engaged to a guy I knew in high school. In the dream, his family lived on a big, successful farm. He left me behind at the house I grew up in and instructed me to take the car he left for me when I was ready to join him at the farm. I did as he said and as the car drew closer to the farm, I realized that I was no longer driving it. It was operating of its own volition. What I mean was, it was steering itself. I couldn’t change its path or make it stop.

As the farm entrance gates closed behind me, I saw a breathtaking vista before me. I reached for my camera and tried to brake so I could get a photo of it. The car wouldn’t stop and I missed the shot I wanted of an unobstructed view. When the car eventually stopped outside a tidy, low-slung ranch house where my fiance waited. I was struck by how I’d never found him attractive. The doors automatically unlocked and I emerged, furious at how my life was suddenly being controlled.

In dreams, I’m still capable of berating someone. Thank goodness.

Not every emotion is dulled. I’m in the middle of a sickening crush on MathMan.  The children are, of course, appalled.

In long-term relationships, this is cyclical. Sometimes I’m crazy, swoony in love and lust with him. Other times I’m playing out Merry Widow fantasies in my head. Sometimes he boos as I’m getting dressed because the Naked Show is over or he charms me by telling me that my panties are like candy wrappers. Other times he completely ignores me, so caught up in his own things and probably playing out Merry Widower fantasies of his own. He, however, has the good sense to never admit it.

He sends me texts in the middle of the day. I miss you.

I miss you, too. I want to be home in bed with you. It might be the most I write all day.

A friend took me to lunch. I won’t call him old even though he’s ten years older than he was when we met. So am I. I look different. He doesn’t, but I tried not to obsess about that while we sat facing each other.

He said those words that give anyone who puts their writing out there both a thrill and a reason to cringe.

I read your blog.

He told me he thought it was really funny and, of course, I lapped that up like a big gray cat.

He wasn’t finished. So what’s happening with your novel?

I eyed him as I licked the compliment from my whiskers. I wanted to enjoy every drop.

“It’s on hold. I don’t think I’m a novelist.” One by one I dealt out my excuses. Time, energy, depression, money worries. They fell flat on the table, scattered and meaningless. After a few moments’ indulgence, he pulled that face that says I’ve heard enough.

The conversation meandered over smoked brisket until we wound back around to writing. He had an idea of what I could write about it. It’s not a bad idea and I’ve already spent some time researching it. Man, that seems like two lifetimes ago. I’ve captured it in a notebook so I won’t forget, but an idea isn’t enough to prompt me to action anymore.

Continued

You think you’re one of a special breed, Part one

I know that I’m best taken in small doses so this long post is divided into three parts.

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. – Stephen Sondheim

I’ve known artists who sought chaos first so they could eventually create their way out of it. Through the pinhole of judgment, I viewed the habit as an excuse to drink or get high or sleep around. To be an asshole was as much a part of the creative process as was anything else.

Even though I’m aces at being an insufferable asshole, I’d rather chew glass than claim my churlishness is due to my artistic nature.  When I’m being an ass, it’s because I’m Scotch-Irish, my father’s daughter, a product of my environment, because I never learned to deal appropriately with my anger, because I enjoy being that way on some level, because I am. I am simply and most-assuredly an asshole. I want to keep it to a minimum, but don’t always reach that goal.

But being difficult because I’m creative? Please. I don’t see myself an artist. I write to process things, not to create. Sure, I like to tell a story, to share something, to make people feel, to allow myself to feel through the words, but that’s therapy not art.

When I wrote my now fallow novel, I attempted to transition from word self-medication to trying to create a new world, a new reality, a new order. I wasn’t ready. That story evolved from one thing to another to another until it was unrecognizable. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t think that’s how cogent, well-written novels are formed.

Later, I began taking anti-depressants and found a job with a very long commute. Writing to process things became less necessary and time became more precious. My already struggling habit of writing suffered an immediate blow.

Now instead of immediately turning to the act of writing through my emotions, I pause and rest with them. What I’ve noticed is that they’re blunted. There’s a buffer between me and passion for the things that had once consumed my imagination. Even the sadness I feel about the death of Morris is smooth around the edges. I leaked tears when I counted out the food bowls – four instead of five – but there’s no pain in my chest, no unstoppable keening, no hurt that translates to the physical. I wipe the tears with the back of my hand and move on.

Other emotions have cooled. No longer mercurial. I’m almost glacial.

My rages lack vigor to the point that they don’t even qualify as rages anymore. They’re more like yawn inspiring rambles about things that kind of annoy me. Nate provided some parental disappointment recently and I didn’t even raise my voice. Instead I opted for disappointed looks and conversation about the practicalities of his boneheaded activities.

My passive aggression is about 5% aggression. How disappointing for someone who has truly enjoyed that label in the past. Now I’m the dreaded passive sentence.

My once well-honed ability to spread the misery lacks its former expertise. My loved ones are grateful.

Is this what contentment feels like?

To be continued.

You think you’re one of a special breed, Part three

Continued from here.

I don’t want to reach. Or push. I enjoy this lack of angst. This calm. Things that would have caused me major emotional upsets a few months ago now glance off me like I’m wearing armor.

Another friend, another conversation. This time about love and commitment. About freedom and recognizing your limitations. Like when you’re good at the front end of a relationship, but fizzle when the expectations become too much and people get hurt. About being honest with yourself and with potential lovers. About how understandings crumble.

It doesn’t matter what a woman says. She wants to be the one who makes you want to change. She has to believe she’s special. If you can’t quit the habit of getting in, then you have to be braced for what comes with getting out. And maybe you care too much or you don’t care enough. Either way, you’re caught in the ripple of emotion. It’s unavoidable.

We want. We want. We want – what?

There’s never a good time to break someone’s heart.

I remember, but I can’t recover the feeling. The broken heart. The suffering and self-loathing. It’s out of reach. Maybe it’s the anti-depressants. Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s an unremembered blow to the head.

I’m reading Augusten Burroughs‘ This Is How – Help for the Self, Proven Aid in Overcoming
Shyness, Grief, Molestation, Disease, Fatness, Lushery, Spinsterhood, Decrepitude, & More
For Young and Old Alike. In the first three essays alone, Burroughs writes of letting yourself feel your feelings and calling them what they are. Anger, fear, hate, pain, joy, happiness, love.

Burroughs nails that self-help trope affirmation to the wall with one word. Bullshit. He beseeches the reader to stop lying to herself/himself and to others. If you’ve pasted on a smile for the benefit of others, Burroughs wants you to wipe that fucking smile from your face. It’s doing more harm than good.

He, too, speaks of long marriages.

Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grow into a brittle barnacle of hatred.

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

Raise your hand if you’ve seen that phrase play out. The pebble in the shoe becomes a boulder you can’t leapfrog, can’t quite ignore, can’t quite wish away.

Okay, hands down.

During my dreadful commute, I’m listening to Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays Farther Away. In it, he recounts his 2011 commencement address at Kenyon College titled Pain Won’t Kill You. He also writes of his friend David Foster Wallace who, he concludes, was bored and thus suicidal. I’m being facile, of course. But that’s the gist. Enough of it, at least. His point in both essays is that we have to experience our feelings because the alternative is what?

Numbness? Zombie-like calm? (I just typed clam instead of calm. Zombie Clams from the Zen Zone – a recipe for life as a reformed rager. This could be the title of what I don’t do next.)

What is this? A conspiracy of library books? Franzen and Burroughs – pushers of feelings. The bastards.

Here I sit all counter-intuitive wearing all black on a sunny day. But my toenails are painted purple. There may be hope for me yet, Doctor Freud.

Mustering all the hypocrisy I could, I gave each of the children the “Your feelings of sadness are natural in a time of grief”speech. I took the day off work and spent time with Sophie who’d watched as Morris was born during hurricane season 2004. Now she’d experience his death. We cried together and talked about what we could have done differently to have perhaps saved him. We didn’t know how sick he was. We pulled on our matching mother/daughter hairshirts and left the house to find something to keep Sophie busy.

When we reached the ice cream eating stage of grief, we finally indulged in some lighter thoughts. We laughed about Morris’s kookier habits. How he was so spoiled as a kitten that he never learned to cover his leavings. The three older cats did it for him. How he didn’t say much, but when he did, he spoke with an earnestness unusual to ginger tabbies who are typically wisecrackers. How he would trap the kids under his bulk and breathe in their faces.

When we started to cover the self-blaming territory again, I told Sophie we’d have to knock it off or I’d be in a corner cutting myself. She wiped away the one tear that slipped down her lashes and announced “I’m never having pets when I’m an adult. This hurts too much.”

I pushed the hair back from her face, touched her soft cheek and felt it still damp. Her deep brown eyes were so sad. This is her first real loss. It almost feels like my own first real loss. As another friend put it, “The death of a cat who is like family hits you harder than the death of some family members because they’re more a part of your every day life.”

I finally allowed myself to feel the pain, too. To point at it and think what I’d been holding back. I wanted my fluffy boy back.  I wanted to walk through the door and see him on the silver metal table and say “Hey, bud.” I wanted to see him waddle quickly across the room as Nathan called him Tub Tub. I wanted to see him make the great leap onto the dining room table only to slide to the other end and come skidding to a stop just in time.

Most of all, I wanted another day so we could see sooner that he was critical. I wanted another day to save him.

I suddenly wanted to rant and rave and kick something across the room. Break glass, beat my fists and let out the sobs I’ve choked back for days. Not the silent tears I hadn’t been able to control, but the heavy, heaving sobs that make your head ache and wear you out. Those I’d been able to control. Funny how that works.

Instead, I took a deep breath, popped what was left of my ice cream cone into my mouth and savored the crunch of it. I looked at Sophie’s bowed head, her hands folded together as if in prayer, but I knew she wasn’t praying. Earlier in the day, she’d told me how she wished she could really believe in god and heaven so that she could imagine Morris somewhere besides just gone.

The sun was blotted out by a cloud and she gave a little shudder. In front of her, her cup of Superman ice cream melted into a tie-dyed puddle. I reached out and she took my hand.

Love and pain. Forever linked.

You think you’re one of a special breed, Part two

Continued from here.

Last night I dreamed I was engaged to a guy I knew in high school. In the dream, his family lived on a big, successful farm. He left me behind at the house I grew up in and instructed me to take the car he left for me when I was ready to join him at the farm. I did as he said and as the car drew closer to the farm, I realized that I was no longer driving it. It was operating of its own volition. What I mean was, it was steering itself. I couldn’t change its path or make it stop.

As the farm entrance gates closed behind me, I saw a breathtaking vista before me. I reached for my camera and tried to brake so I could get a photo of it. The car wouldn’t stop and I missed the shot I wanted of an unobstructed view. When the car eventually stopped outside a tidy, low-slung ranch house where my fiance waited. I was struck by how I’d never found him attractive. The doors automatically unlocked and I emerged, furious at how my life was suddenly being controlled.

In dreams, I’m still capable of berating someone. Thank goodness.

Not every emotion is dulled. I’m in the middle of a sickening crush on MathMan.  The children are, of course, appalled.

In long-term relationships, this is cyclical. Sometimes I’m crazy, swoony in love and lust with him. Other times I’m playing out Merry Widow fantasies in my head. Sometimes he boos as I’m getting dressed because the Naked Show is over or he charms me by telling me that my panties are like candy wrappers. Other times he completely ignores me, so caught up in his own things and probably playing out Merry Widower fantasies of his own. He, however, has the good sense to never admit it.

He sends me texts in the middle of the day. I miss you.

I miss you, too. I want to be home in bed with you. It might be the most I write all day.

A friend took me to lunch. I won’t call him old even though he’s ten years older than he was when we met. So am I. I look different. He doesn’t, but I tried not to obsess about that while we sat facing each other.

He said those words that give anyone who puts their writing out there both a thrill and a reason to cringe.

I read your blog.

He told me he thought it was really funny and, of course, I lapped that up like a big gray cat.

He wasn’t finished. So what’s happening with your novel?

I eyed him as I licked the compliment from my whiskers. I wanted to enjoy every drop.

“It’s on hold. I don’t think I’m a novelist.” One by one I dealt out my excuses. Time, energy, depression, money worries. They fell flat on the table, scattered and meaningless. After a few moments’ indulgence, he pulled that face that says I’ve heard enough.

The conversation meandered over smoked brisket until we wound back around to writing. He had an idea of what I could write about it. It’s not a bad idea and I’ve already spent some time researching it. Man, that seems like two lifetimes ago. I’ve captured it in a notebook so I won’t forget, but an idea isn’t enough to prompt me to action anymore.

Continued

You think you’re one of a special breed, Part one

I know that I’m best taken in small doses so this long post is divided into three parts.

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. – Stephen Sondheim

I’ve known artists who sought chaos first so they could eventually create their way out of it. Through the pinhole of judgment, I viewed the habit as an excuse to drink or get high or sleep around. To be an asshole was as much a part of the creative process as was anything else.

Even though I’m aces at being an insufferable asshole, I’d rather chew glass than claim my churlishness is due to my artistic nature.  When I’m being an ass, it’s because I’m Scotch-Irish, my father’s daughter, a product of my environment, because I never learned to deal appropriately with my anger, because I enjoy being that way on some level, because I am. I am simply and most-assuredly an asshole. I want to keep it to a minimum, but don’t always reach that goal.

But being difficult because I’m creative? Please. I don’t see myself an artist. I write to process things, not to create. Sure, I like to tell a story, to share something, to make people feel, to allow myself to feel through the words, but that’s therapy not art.

When I wrote my now fallow novel, I attempted to transition from word self-medication to trying to create a new world, a new reality, a new order. I wasn’t ready. That story evolved from one thing to another to another until it was unrecognizable. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t think that’s how cogent, well-written novels are formed.

Later, I began taking anti-depressants and found a job with a very long commute. Writing to process things became less necessary and time became more precious. My already struggling habit of writing suffered an immediate blow.

Now instead of immediately turning to the act of writing through my emotions, I pause and rest with them. What I’ve noticed is that they’re blunted. There’s a buffer between me and passion for the things that had once consumed my imagination. Even the sadness I feel about the death of Morris is smooth around the edges. I leaked tears when I counted out the food bowls – four instead of five – but there’s no pain in my chest, no unstoppable keening, no hurt that translates to the physical. I wipe the tears with the back of my hand and move on.

Other emotions have cooled. No longer mercurial. I’m almost glacial.

My rages lack vigor to the point that they don’t even qualify as rages anymore. They’re more like yawn inspiring rambles about things that kind of annoy me. Nate provided some parental disappointment recently and I didn’t even raise my voice. Instead I opted for disappointed looks and conversation about the practicalities of his boneheaded activities.

My passive aggression is about 5% aggression. How disappointing for someone who has truly enjoyed that label in the past. Now I’m the dreaded passive sentence.

My once well-honed ability to spread the misery lacks its former expertise. My loved ones are grateful.

Is this what contentment feels like?

Continued.

The Remorrisful Day*

So long, Butterscotch Lion, Fluffball of Love, the kitten born behind Sophie’s bed, the one we kept. The Stealth Pooper.

Rest in piece, Morris. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to kiss you on your forehead one last time.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=109615

*Title courtesy of MathMan who knows how to make me laugh through the tears and the Inspector Morse series.