The way that some women talk about one another, teeth dripping poison.

What brings you up must take me down.

Telling tales and skewing stories,

but what shook me most was the denigration of my love

of exploration.

I winced when I heard

she swept aside sincerity and made it silly when

I stopped to pick up seashells, to

examine cool rocks and all that accompanied the exciting newness of

the flora and fauna of a novel clime.

She tapped her foot as I waded into warm salty water

to try and rescue

the flashing dorado swimming in circles in the surf,

missing one fin,

its eyes blinking, shining and panicky.

I just wanted to put it to rights.

So yes, it hit like a blow, to hear

the retelling of my wonderment as ridiculous,

to realize myself taken advantage of.

But I was kind to her without expectations or suspicion,

and she was crueller, knowing that meant

she could never win.

Listened to a live version of Waltz #2 by Elliott Smith today because that song breaks me every time I hear it and I felt like wallowing. Heard his speaking voice tremulously thanking a bunch of people at the end of his tour. I’ve never heard him speak before, it kinda shattered me a little bit. Hard to explain. This song was really, really, really important to me when I was a teenager. And still, as someone who always falls harder, gets kicked to the curb, feels the most, I feel like Elliott Smith probably got that and got it worse than I did. And he’s not here any more.

Anyway. I needn’t have wallowed, really. But I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I picked up my old kitty cat. She’s 19 now, my constant childhood companion, and so feeble and slow that it’s hard to recognize her as the sleek black shadow the vet once called “the fittest cat I’ve ever seen”. I’m home, but things are different, just a little different, and I don’t really fit here any more, and I don’t know how many times I will get to say goodbye to my cat again. I picked her up, and this song began playing, and I just started to cry. She’s so old and hates being picked up, is sensitive about where she is touched, but she curled her claws into my shoulder and started to rumble her tiny purr and looked out the window at the snow with me while I stroked her, her green eyes reflecting the light in a way I couldn’t see her cataracts, and it was just like I was fifteen again and we would be going out to explore summery woods, her little ears flicking as she pretended she wasn’t following me. Tears running down my cheeks, and I know part of it is the stupid song, Bon Iver way too good at touching my emotions: I cry under a hands’ count every year, it’s not much, but fuck, tears rolling down my cheek. Home is such a complicated thing. It is good and it is sad and whether a place or a thing or a person or a combination, nothing remains constant, and death and change are inexorable inevitabilities that can be so wonderful and so cruel. Even in the midst of a wonderful, joyful rest, with a family I love, moments like this come. Christmas and Home even for someone so lucky as I am are never simple, never easy, and I wonder if I will ever be able to create that Home for myself the way it is here, with my mum, and this dying cat.

Consequences

You:

a knife with no handle

Me:

cut when I try to hold you