Sunday, November 25, 2007

So

I don't know what to do with myself. I woke up at 6:30 PM. It was so dark I was hoping it was the middle of the night. I think things are pretty together - my apartment fairly organized, and clean. My cat and I have had our medicine, but I don't know how to decide when to give it to either of us again, when I don't know what times of day our days happen. It's very well-intentioned hit-or-miss.

Her medicine matters more than mine, my cat's. She has only 20% kidney function, and can't regulate fluid levels by drinking water and peeing. Her kind of degenerative kidney failure is I'm told always progressive, but she almost died (below four pounds), more than two years ago. I was torn apart at the completely unpredicted idea that she might die before me. I had been used to worrying about who would care for her when I was gone.

But she is doing well. (And I am doing well physically.) She looks as vitally sleek and shiny as she ever did now, and surprises her doctors every time we visit them (every two months). But her health is work, too.

I have to give her her 150 milliliters of electrolyte fluids every "day" - or whatever close to twenty-four hours we manage - through a long needle in her scruff, from an IV-looking bag hung on the finial of my grandparents Chippendale dresser. We sit on the hardwood floor and growl. (I's not actually "IV," but deep subcutaneous. She's not happy - at all - about it at the time - but forgives quickly, and seems to thrive in response.

People say they can tell you're helping them, sick animals. But I feel like it's respectful of me know that I don't know what she thinks about having a needle stuck in her neck - or what she thinks of anything else. But I do know, beyond intentions, that we are bonded as I believe I would be with any human child - which for me is saying as much as is possible to say about that.

It matters to both our health for me to be the one staying on a normal sleep cycle, but I seem to be immune to sleep medications sometimes. Now. I took extra antipsychotics today (which I am encouraged to do much, much more than I do), but I think that they override other medicines we all agree I need, too. And sleep is number one regulatory maintenance.

...I miss sleeping in the daybed in the bedroom of the apartment my friend KD was renting while he was visiting here. But Sophia (- my cat who I've already disclosed KD calls "So") is passionately happy I'm back, "sleeping" - I hope, here with her.

KD called from LA, and I thanked him for the time together and the thanksgiving dinner picnic on my hard floor he shared with me.

He had dinner with Alanis Morissett tonight. How is it that people in my life have people in their lives like that - so casually. (Maybe not so casually. He said they were checking each other out. But that it didn't work. I asked why, and he said "Ah...ah...I don't know. I'm picky." And I said that I was honored, then. (We were together five years.) He said, "You should be, " but I don't think he meant it as arrogantly as it sounded. He was attracted to my pathos. He does love me still, and I'm still sometimes pathetic, but I'm not on the sharp edge of dying anymore.

And what am I doing in their lives, too - KD and his famous people - at virtually the same time? Is it all left-over, once-removed "karma" from when my life was so charged? The fact that I was alive at all was so charged? The people I'm talking about in my life (in those circles) all met me a long time ago. I don't meet new people who know people anymore. "They're all just people, when you meet them," they say.

Yeah sort of. I remember what that was like. Maybe if I had a talent - other than survival, I would love the charges of those charged connections still. I believe if my life were constant talents would reveal themselves, attracting what I don't know.

I suppose I'm answering all my own questions. In circles. I'm not up for all that anymore.

I feel like I love Alanis Morissett, and her style feels personally familiar to me, (more than to KD - I know more about her than he does), but if KD had said, "Hey, do you want to have dinner with Alanis Morissett tonight? - which he would have done if they weren't flirting with possibilities, I don't know what all that would have made me feel.

When I was still rushing and glowing from coming back from my trip two weeks ago, and feeling well-loved, and equal to another in some terms, I probably would have said, Yeah sure, in a tentative heartbeat. But the fact of it is, I can't hold it together - me at my best, which means me at my competent - for very long periods of time at all, and I'm really not up for forcing the timing of my competence to fit beautiful opportunities anymore.

I have my KD most days on the phone, and for the slumber parties when he's here, on tour, and I have my Belgian romance - truly a thorough love of my life - (for a week every year or two, with little to no communication in between), and I have my brother and family members to feel close to without speaking all that much, - and I have "So" - my sick black cat, who couldn't be more exquisitely beautiful and tender. Sleepy as she is.

I wish this post were more coherent.

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