I’ll soon be clearing out my archives of the more personal material, as I tend to do from time to time. In the meantime, feel free to copy and paste anything for your own personal files. Thanks for reading!
When a small child you have never met
picks up her foot to step off a curb
and into rush-hour traffic
approximately thirty feet from where you are sitting,
right now,
idly drinking your iced coffee
and letting the pattern of the metal patio chair beneath you
imprint itself onto your thighs,
and you look up from your newspaper just in time
to see the sole of that one tiny shoe leave the earth,
you will work so hard.
You will topple your chair without hearing it clatter to the ground,
you will pump your knees,
and you will see only one thing in this world.
All of you will move in the same direction at once,
more quickly and more slowly than ever in your life,
all of you on fire,
none of you caring whether you put on makeup today
or whether you dropped your ATM card down the storm drain this morning
or whether anyone loves you.
There is no effort,
no slap of your feet against the concrete,
no twang in your hamstrings,
no thump in your chest;
nothing of that you can exist where you are.
You have dropped every mask and cloak and box
you have ever hidden or trapped yourself in;
all have burned away as you launched yourself
toward this one thing,
forever toward it,
this one and only thing you can remember ever wanting.
You could sprint right out of your clothes
and you wouldn’t care, not a bit;
you are, in just this one moment, free
of almost everything you have ever learned
or worried about
or been led to believe.
Not just the petty problems, but bigger problems, too,
are gone from you.
Hunger, poverty, war, torture:
you have heard of none of them.
You have rendered them nonexistent
with a power that you had not been able to find
until just now,
when a child picked up her foot to step off a curb.
Out of concern for the potentially dead child,
whom I assure you I have completely made up,
you may not yet have noticed that what I am describing
is not only remarkably easy,
but also wonderful.
So perhaps instead I should tell you,
even if it is a far less illuminating example,
that a baseball is falling from the sky
toward your spot in the bleachers,
and you are rising up to meet it.
You are not breathing with the lungs you don’t have,
and you are unfurling a pair of legs that your mind has disowned,
and you have forgotten how much you weigh,
much less that bayonet of a remark
that your own mother ran through you
just ten minutes prior, when you ordered nachos.
The ball is dropping,
and you are reaching,
and this will never be over,
nor should it ever be over,
because the slap of that ball in your hand is not the climax
but the resolution begun,
at which point the world and its mess
will spring up around you once more,
unwieldy and bittersweet all over again.
The key to peace, I have decided
is not praying,
or thinking,
or sitting still,
or humming,
or chanting,
or lighting candles.
The key to satisfaction, I have discovered
is not a new kitchen countertop
or a new pair of shoes
or a faster car
or–dare I say it?
any given cellular phone.
It is to find within yourself a desire so intense
that it drowns you out and washes you clean,
and yet so simple
that even if you fulfill it,
the result will be nothing more costly
than the back of a child’s shirt clutched in your fist
or a dusty baseball in your hand.
I only know this because
(despite the nonexistence of a potentially dead child,
who, again, I assure you I have completely made up)
all of me is moving in the same direction at once,
more quickly and more slowly than ever in my life,
all of me on fire,
none of me caring whether I put on makeup today
or whether I dropped my ATM card down the storm drain this morning
or whether anyone loves me.
Nito, my cat, died last week.
On Tuesday, I found myself alone in an exam room with his limp, sick body in the crook of my arm and his head under my chin and I spread out a beach towel on the metal table, so he wouldn’t be cold when he died. It’s funny, how you just automatically do those things. I’ve never thought of myself as maternal in the traditional sense, but there I was, unthinkingly smoothing the terrycloth out even though I was crying so hard that I could barely see.
And then I paused with my gigantic fourteen-pound cat, with the boneless weight of him, because this would be the last time I held him. There is something sacred in that heft, like the way your shoulder feels under a baby’s head or the way your thumbs feel hooked into the belt loops of someone you love, pulling them closer. I used to pick him up every time I came home, to greet that reassuring weight that belonged to me, that I had tended.
I looked down at his enormous paws, just dangling toward the ground–whether in illness or in trust, I don’t know, but to be honest, at that point, it was probably more of the former–and I can still see them when I close my eyes, in contrast against the white tiles. That is the last thing I saw before I relinquished him–not by watching him die, but by easing him onto the table and away from me.
That was good-bye, at least for me.
Then the vet came in, and I petted his head and told him what a good boy he was, and he died, and that was it. I walked blindly out of the office with his empty carrier and fumbled my way into the car while my sister stayed behind and paid the bill.
And when I got home, after I unlocked the door and almost said hello to him, I climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling for hours, and all I kept thinking was not Nito is dead or I’ll never see him again but just What now? What now? What now? because I already felt lost–not sad as one who has lost something very dear, but thunderstruck by baffled horror, as one whose shadow has been flayed off.
Terrible, yes. Painful, yes. But mainly, so disconcertingly goddamned impossible.
Oh, I know. He was just a cat. I don’t mind. I think that’s what makes an animal lover–we don’t mind you small. We don’t mind you stupid. We don’t mind you simple. We are humbled, rather than frustrated or scornful, at your ability to be all of those things. We know that you still have gifts to give, however unknowingly, and that it is our honor to receive them. If some of us do not have babies, it has less to do with how small and stupid and simple they are (as is the common misconception) and much more to do with the fact that babies don’t stay that way. Their lessons become tangled for us the bigger they get, convoluted, nonexistent. They become mysteries, as we are mysteries. You put them in our arms and we fear them, and sometimes even mourn them, not for what they are but for what they will be in fifty years.
But Nito, thankfully, was just a cat, and perfect at it, sitting on the top of the toilet tank with his tail curled neatly around his feet while I read in the tub, or resting against my ribs while I worked on manuscripts.
This is the end of his story, and his story wasn’t anything profound. But that is the art and the joy of being just a cat.
After he died, I stepped over sweatshirts that I thought were cats. I reached down to pet the air. I said hello to no one an embarrassing number of times upon unlocking my deadbolt and stepping into my house. I lay awake each night, crying, because I couldn’t remember how to power down without a purring cat to stay still for.
I’ll get a new cat in a few weeks, a month, I said. I shouldn’t do it now. I should wait. It makes more sense to wait.
I don’t think anyone believed me, which is why on Friday, after three days of pathetic foundering, I received a brisk phone call from my mother telling me to come down to Petsmart and sign for this cat she was going to get me. And I want to tell you I rolled out of bed and pulled on some pants because it is impossible to argue with my mother. But that’s not why I got up, not really.
I met him with a disproportionate amount of fear in my mouth, considering that a sock-footed, pink-nosed, gray-striped tabby cat is not typically a very intimidating sight. And the rest of the story goes the way it has gone every single time an animal needing a home has found its way into my lap.
I woke up this morning with a cat in my armpit, is what I’m telling you: head up under my chin, paws stretched across my chest, butt in the crook of my elbow.
He isn’t Nito, and he isn’t ever going to be Nito. He is just Winston.
I’m realizing all over again, though, that just is more than good enough.
“My love of [you] is in me, moving in my heart, changing chambers, like something poured from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.” –Sharon Olds, “High School Senior”
I build the version of you that I love inside of me. I think everyone does, often without knowing it, and they get upset when that inner version disagrees with the truer, fleshier version, which is has the advantage of being incarnate but is, quite frankly, unknowable, unstable, and unpredictable. I get upset, too, like anyone, when I am stung by disappointment or surprised by some mismatch between the working model of you that I carry within me and who you are being, to me, right now.
Please join me while I say something terrifically, disastrously unpopular. This is bound to be fun for all of us!
This blog is old, and perhaps seemingly irrelevant at first to the ridiculously privileged (see: most of us), but I find poignancy in almost every post–and, sometimes, outrage at the ways in which society dehumanizes the homeless. (You can’t sleep in your car if you feel like it? Really? What kind of anti-American bullshit is that?)
My favorite post, though, is this one, about calming yourself and carrying on, one step at a time.
I love this article about how to act like a grownup. (Thanks, Jul, for the link.)
The only thing I disagree with philosophically is that I’ve never felt that thank-you cards are necessary. I have never had a problem accepting a heartfelt thank-you offered in person or a sincere e-mail of gratitude; I don’t think we need to spend money or kill trees just to say that we appreciate what someone has done for us. Thank-you cards are nice, too, of course, but I don’t know that I would have a very high opinion of a friend who sits around thinking about how my expression of thanks wasn’t good enough for them.
I love the rest of it, though, especially #6, #14, #15, and #19. Well said.
Jeff and I are in Madrid. Yes, my ex-husband and I went to Madrid together. Many potentially fascinating theories could explain this odd development, but here, let me save you the trouble: we are in Spain together simply because we both wanted to go to Spain.
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