In these seemingly dog days of spring, I can hear the purrs lighting up every surface in my house. This has been a runaway spring, in light of the heat, of retrograde, supposed regression, and loss.
The heaviness of loss hangs oppressively like dew on the spiderweb branches of this house. The skeleton bones of the architecture flash through my skull and I see the bones like an X-ray inside my brain. This house is old, but it is not the same as the house I grew up in. It has neighbors on all sides, and I can hear their day-to-days trickle through the slivers in my wall. To me, this is real. I remember I am, too.
This house has always been drafty, but ever more so in the hollowness of my own frame.
They say the purrs of the cat are engineered to synchronize with the beatings of a human heart. They say these purrs are engineered to heal. I hear these purrs sometimes, and they are more like vibrations against my skin than they are externalized. These purrs evaporate when sound touches air. Are they only for me?
A long time ago, all of these words didn’t make any sense. When I read them back to me, I couldn’t understand them, and I thought I was crazy for writing them. Now, I see them as strokes of light painting my scenery. Life to me has always been a checkered chess board. The voices are the real paint strokes I see.
I think often of my friends that are gone. I was listening to my favorite Moose Blood song, which sounds like the most pretentious band out there. And I thought of them. When I did, I cried in the car all the way home from hot yoga. Then, I cried some more in the shower, in the kitchen, and in my living room. I cried a lot, and I made space for them when I couldn’t before.
Sometimes, in the face of my cat, I see my friend Verona and I wonder how she’s doing. Lately, I’ve been driving on the same freeway where she died, and I think about her all the time. In the face of my cat, I see the love, the fear, the wondering of what is to come.
I miss Verona every day.
I was thinking as I watched the tendrils of smoke drift away that something in me was aching more than usual and yet, I couldn’t quite put a finger on it. I was watching an interview where children spoke to a 101-year-old woman, and I thought about my great-grandma who made it pretty close. I wish I could hold her hand again.
Then I remember, in the springtime, Demonslayer would release a new season, a new movie, something for us all to watch. Then I think of Jordan and Tanjiro’s earrings that I asked his mom to bury him with. I should dig my own matching pair out of storage to remember him sometime.
I talk about it in therapy, and I remember that when Jordan died, I was on the way to Oyasono for the first time. I know I brought him to really rest there, and when I prayed for him, I know my great-grandma was there with me too. I go through all of these memories in my head, and I can’t believe they all happened in such a short time, as most events we want to remember do.
I think of the dream where I saw Jordan for the last time, and I see his silhouette against the silver of the waning moon. I hope he met my great-grandma somewhere, but I have no idea what they would talk about.
Last week, I went to dinner at a bee-themed restaurant after a long day of work. There are many friends in my life who have taught me the importance of bees and their role in propagating healthy flora the way we know it. I see the quintessential bee drink on the menu, and I chuckled to myself.
“I had a friend that had a tattoo of a bee on his knee, and he called it the ‘bee’s knees,’” I said out loud before I could help it.
The table laughed.
“That’s a hell of a dad joke.”
“Which friend is this? How did you know him? That’s hilarious.”
“David died almost two years ago. But this is how I always remember him by, and it always makes me laugh.”
The table is quiet. I don’t blame them. I probably would be too.
I can’t help it. I remember them at the strangest times. Sometimes, it’s like they didn’t exist at all. On other days, I can’t help but miss them, and the gaping hole in my chest without them actually weighs less than the pit weighing me down inside.
When I was finding the document to write this piece on, I caught a saved image of me and David years back before the pandemic. I hadn’t seen his face in years. All I remember is the last text message he ever sent me and I miss him so, so much. We argued all the time. He used to piss me off every time he opened his mouth, but at times, he was one of the most tender, vulnerable people I had the privilege of being around. I never wrote to David when he died, and I always chalked it up to life and fast times.
David, when I found out you died, it was Kyle that called me. I don’t know how this always happens, but I always seem to get this bad news on voicemail, and I find out in the AI transcript faster than I do over the line. I always wait out the whole message just in case AI got it all wrong, but I never have any such luck.
David, when I got the call that you died, I thought about when you texted me a few months before in May. I collapsed on the floor when I thought that maybe if I hadn’t been so self-absorbed in my own life, you’d still be able to respond to my message, which you never did…
David, when they told me how you died, I imagined you in the car by yourself and I wish I could’ve broken the door in to stop you. But life doesn’t work that way, and I know that. When I think about slashing my wrists open, which I still do no matter how much better I tell myself, I don’t expect anyone to stop me. I know we don’t want them to.
There’s something wicked about March and the thick layer of devastation beating us down in this country. I haven’t been able to regulate myself in the way I want, and I have been a bit more volatile than I’d care to admit.
I feel how tightly I hold my jaw everyday and realize this is not in my control. This does not help regulate me any further. Jojo reminds me that I have to let my wise mind and emotional mind speak with one another to achieve the state of radical acceptance, and though I can rationalize this in session, I cannot remember this when I wake up in the morning.
I find that my mind is even louder than I knew was possible. There are so many figures of light in the corners of my vision, and I also find that these figures take away from the imagination of television. I see and hear enough in my immediate plane of sight. I often see visions that I remember were my previous dreams, but I witnessed them as hallucinations in my reality.
Yet even in these tumultuous state of times, when the world has forsaken hope and we cling to despair as the last remnant of feeling, I seek temporary solace in the mistaken blessings we have.
Despite the concrete jungles we find ourselves, there is rawness in the bittersweet outcomes of our circumstances. I find a very odd, gleeful irony when the car weaving in and out of traffic ends up at the same intersection as I do, even though I know sometimes, that car might be me. Which tells me, in my fraying grasping of the day-to-day, karmic retribution is seeking counsel at last. The visceral pendulum swinging its way through social causes and political spectrums is sweeping through centuries of unspoken, unforgiven, unmediated unrest. We just happen to be the ones here to receive the fallout, and it hurts as much as it doesn’t make sense sometimes.
I feel like I am grounded in mud, and I hate mud. Mud doesn’t invite grace, and unfortunately, it tends to splatter. Even so, the mind sometimes fabricates isolation or creates stories that grow in fear and magnitude with each retelling.
I find that most mistaken blessings are steeped in surprise. Surprise in how something made me feel, how something turned out, how someone reacted.
I think again about the people in my life I have lost. Of the surprise I felt when I lost them, and the surprise I felt as I started to talk about life without them in it, even if they were always there in the background.
I think of all the feelings I had to acknowledge when I lost them and how it changed when I accepted the surprise I felt alongside all those other feelings. Then I asked myself, why the fuck do all these feelings exist? There isn’t enough space for them all.
Perhaps the most tender awakening that slapped me in the face is how much we spend minutes of our day in a blase mode. There is nothing wrong in not feeling at all or completely falling apart. We often forget there is space for that too.
But the blase, that is burnout space. Within this space, we have to reconcile all extreme emotions that exist in the ether, without a controlled environment to externalize in. It’s no wonder we feel like lab rats in our own existence.
But that’s the whole thing. It’s okay to just exist.
At least for right now.
The incessant purring comes back into focus as my cat once again attaches herself against me. The same vibration, the same consistency, the same song every time I come back to reality. It’s almost like she’s giving me a life.
In the dog days of spring, when the heat threatens to melt every wire in our skeleton, there is an unmechanistic harmony in the cacophony of broken parts stirring up inside my cats. But in these dog days, they are the cicada rhythms bringing my heart back to life.
The tender awakenings are the ones I find in the face of the cat smothering her fur against my nose. They tenderly invite life back into the skin and soul. They keep me hearing my breath for the next little while, until I hear that breath sync into the guttural purrs that reverberate against my hollow frame, which I never was able to hear before.
Ellamental Thoughts 