Häni—loss
I rarely re-read books, but I'm re-reading The Midnight Library. It's about a woman who tries to kill herself after her cat dies and her job goes south (did I mention that's in trouble, too?) and she realizes she's alone. She winds up in the in-between, not quite alive, not quite dead, in a place called the Midnight Library, where all the decisions she's ever made are housed in a multiverse that looks like a library. By choosing to rescind any given choice, she can open a book and be transported to another universe to see how her life would be different there. I wish I could do that.
I'm not doing very well. In the first week of November, Mocha died. In the second week, I gave Graysee to a neighbor and didn't even get to tell her goodbye. I tried texting the neighbor, asking if I could keep her for a few more weeks until I settled from Mocha's death, but didn't get a response. Yesterday, I had to leave school because I wasn't functioning well from all the losses. My mom also casually mentioned my dad's melanoma had returned and he needed surgery. Oh, and then a principal scheduled meeting that may result in disciplinary action at school. I kind of feel like a dam with a million fissures right now.
How do you deal with loss, particularly when it comes all at once, like an avalanche? I wish there were a Midnight Library I could just go to and experience infinite other lives where none of these things were happening. Maybe in one universe, Graysee actually likes me, the woman who adopted her, better than the neighbor up the street. Maybe in another, Mocha never tried to climb the fence. In another, my dad never went to Vietnam and got exposed to so much sun that he developed endless bouts of melanoma. In another, I had a boss who believed in me. I want to experience different lives, ones where I don't have clinical depression or OCD, where I still have a family, even if it is just a feline one. Instead, I'm stuck in this shitty universe.
My mind doesn't know how to handle all the loss in this universe. It tries and fails.
The other night at 11:56 pm, I was startled awake. I'd heard some kind of animal fight outside. I was three-quarters asleep as I ran down the curved staircase in my house and out the front door, leaving it wide open behind me.
I saw a shape, a shadow, something across the street on the neighbor's white picket fence. I couldn't tell if it was a raccoon, a cat, a possum, or something else entirely, but I ran toward it. I got all the way up to the fence and could see that it was a cat -- two cats, actually. One was a larger calico, and one was a tiny tortieshell-ragdoll mix. They both looked at me, and I looked at them. And then I blinked and they turned into a Boston fern hanging from the ceiling on my neighbor's porch, and I was standing in her driveway, and there was no fence where any cat could ever have been standing.
I looked behind me at my porch. I had left my house wide open to literally chase the phantom of a cat in the middle of the night. That can't be good.
I've been thinking about how to cope with loss and coming up blank, other than "stay busy and try not to take it out on the teenagers," which I'm apparently failing at. I went to a couple of shelters to try to find another cat, one that would actually like me, but every time I go, I just get incredibly sad.
First, I get sad about all the pets that need to be adopted.
Then, I get sad about wanting another Siamese instead of, say, a 3-legged Tabby cat. I feel like a bad person, and that makes me sad.
Then, I get sad because I'm going home without a cat at all.
And lastly, I get sad when I walk into my silent, dark house where the cat bed is empty and no one's perched in a window watching for my car or waiting to bolt out the front door when I open it.
My cats were my family. My actual, biological family has forgotten to invite me to at least 5 different holiday gatherings in recent years. I've sat at home on my couch with my cats, crying rivers of tears and realizing how easy it is to forget a single person who doesn't come attached to a partner and children. I take up less space in someone's home, so I'm easier to overlook. At least, that's what I imagine happens. I wonder at times if that's why some people gain enormous amounts of weight? Perhaps they want to be harder to overlook? Maybe in one universe, I am enormous, and the entire clan has to plan holidays around me because I cannot be moved.
"We didn't actually forget about you," various family members always say, "It's just that we assumed we had told everyone when and where Thanksgiving dinner was taking place this year!"
"Right," I always say, "But you didn't tell me. You didn't even notice I wasn't there until I finally texted someone. That's what forgetting is."
So now I dread holidays even more than before. Now, it will really just be me sitting on my couch in the dark. Graysee won't be there to glare balefully at me, and Mocha won't be there to curl up on my lap and lick away my tears.
I wondered briefly about quitting yoga. Since Mocha died while I was running through my yoga sequence, I didn't know how I could forgive myself or teach. Wouldn't I spend the whole time trying not to have a panic attack and wondering which song my playlist was on when she fell off that fence?
I asked Therapy Elsa about it and if she thought I would be even more sad if I quit yoga, too, because then I'd be losing two things instead of just one (or three now, with Graysee). She said quitting yoga would be a way of punishing myself for a cruel accident. I think she is right. I cannot lose anything else right now. Not while I only have this one universe to live in.
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