Black Cat

There’s a bend in the road where the deer cross. I’ve been warned to be careful there so I slow a little which is probably why I noticed it in the first place. The feral black cat with half a tail and shocking green eyes. The spitting image of a rough life. It was by the side of the road pawing at something and stopped to watch as I passed by.

On my return trip, I saw the cat again. It had to be the same one, right? That half a tail and the split ear. This time on the opposite side of the road on the other end of the curve, shoulder deep in the late summer grass, stalking something.

Taking that route a couple of days later, I saw the cat. It – he? – she? was about half a mile from where I’d seen it before, just stepping off the road and into the brush covering the steep bank that sucks the road down its slope a little further with each passing year.

I puzzled over this. Was it a sign? Why have I seen this same cat three times? What are the odds? Black cats have been given a bad rap what with being equated with bad luck and all that.  But this is my little metaphysical fantasy and I’m switching things up.

I’m viewing this particular feline as a sign of survival. That cat right there, with its half tail, split ear, and sharp green eyes looks like it’s survived its share of scrapes and has lived another day to paw and stalk and to serve as a sign that survival isn’t always pretty, but it beats the hell out of the alternative.

What signs have you seen lately?

Salty

I cannot shake this feeling of being lost.

And loss.

A year after my divorce from MathMan and my physical, and, if I’m even going to attempt to truth tell here, the emotional separation from my children, I am finally grieving.

No longer busy with a move or rediscovering old friends and old places or launching new relationships or learning a new line of work, I am finally forced to sit with my feelings.

Dangerous territory indeed.

I spent 365 days being mostly impermeable. Mostly. Oh, the trips from Georgia were punctuated with tears and internal raging, but I could stay anesthetized. If my mind skittered too close to the reality of what I’d willingly given up, I’d force it to glance off that first seizure of pain and focus, focus, focus on the matter at hand. The song. The audio book. The old comedy, tinny and silly, coming from the radio.

Things did get through, of course. My armor, while comprised mostly of mega-strength bullshit, self-deception and denial, had its chinks. I couldn’t ignore the changes I’d wrought, the ways I’d reshaped my family and markedly changed all of our futures.

It wasn’t the tears of my children or the pleadings from MathMan that I once again return to the family home, that got to me. Note, of course, that those things did not happen. These people are so vaccinated against my insanity that they aren’t giving away much. If they were feeling the loss of a mother and companion, they didn’t let it show much.

What got to me was the knowledge that they were all doing quite well without me. And not only that, but they seemed happier, calmer, and closer than ever before.

Now that I’m here in Georgia and must revisit my old life briefly as I pick up and drop off Sophia at her father’s house, my former home, I am confronted with the consequences of my actions every weekend. This is harder than I expected it to be. But then, I don’t know what I expected.

It became clear to me that I am squarely on the outside. Alone. Getting acquainted with loss like a head-on collision.

That’s when it happened.

I let myself cry. I let go and the tears came. I cried. And cried. And then I worried that I couldn’t stop crying.

Interspersed with the ugly crying was berating and name calling. Lisa on Lisa violence.

I cried while I ate dinner alone. I literally cried into my beer. I wept until the front of my tee shirt felt soggy. I sniffled at my reflection in the mirror as I brushed my teeth. I learned that flossing while all crybaby and snotty isn’t easy. I sobbed as I wrote another email of apology and explanation to MathMan. I went to bed in tears and tasted the salt, felt the liquid pooling in my ears. I woke up in tears, furious that I had to be awake. I cried in the shower. I tried to put on mascara while bawling. That was fun.

I cried as I drove to work, the red taillights more of a blur than usual. I cried in my parked car because I didn’t want to go into the office. My coworker stopped to say hello and I cried behind a wadded up tissue. I went to the bathroom and, you guessed it. More tears.

I tried to stay busy at work but that wasn’t foolproof. At one point I stopped crying to hiccup “this is ridiculous” before I went back to quiet weeping.

365 days worth of tears all in a day. It was exhausting. And cleansing. Just like I’d always heard it would be.

Today I only cried a couple of times, both quite briefly, and only once in front of someone. Good thing, too, because I was starting to get a little too comfortable crying in front of people.

Tomorrow maybe I won’t cry at all. I don’t expect to be cried out, but at least I can feel the corner coming. I’m about to turn it. All those tears were some kind of purge. The dam broke, the flood came and now the waters will recede.

It had to happen. I know this now. Because until I finally let myself feel those things, I was never going to get off of this square of self-loathing and rage. And finally, I can see that this is how the healing begins.