23 February
I am overwhelmed at the mail I have been getting.
It has all been so kind, from people I know and people I don't, good friends, longtime readers who have never written before, people who just started reading. Most of the time the mail just makes me smile--it's so sweet of them to send this genuine outpouring of affection, but once or twice, I don't know if it's because of where I am at that moment or because that particular combination of letters and spaces touches something primal in me, but I had to go to the bathroom and cry a little a couple of times during work yesterday.
It's interesting, feeling the house settle around Milo not being here. There was a space that he used to occupy, and I can feel the rooms expecting that space to be filled, I can feel the air molecules slowly start to collapse around it with a pop.
It's like in Howl's Moving Castle (great book if you have never read it) when they move the castle room to fit a different space and it sort of stretches and contracts and settles into this new shape. The same, in a way, but also somewhat different.
The other cats seems to be pretty much continuing their previous dynamic, though they appear to be stretching and contracting a little bit themselves, finding this triad shape, rather than the former trapezoidal one. The same, in a way, but also somewhat different.
I always realized without realizing that it was Milo who always pushed my door open, but it didn't really occur to me how often I would come home and find the door closed, and how startling that would be. Yesterday, though, I came home and it was open, and I said, "Did Milo open the door?"
"Let Milo open the door
Let Milo open the door
Let Milo open the door
To my house..."
I guess if I am singing kitty songs, I am starting to feel better. Although it is a terrible shock to start singing a song or saying a rhyme and find how I have to change it. For eleven years I have fed the cats and said, as I was feeding them one, two, three, four, "One kitty, two kitty, red kitty, blue kitty," but I'm short one blue kitty now.
I feel unfinished.
On Wednesday, I stayed home from work and Cynthia and I buried Milo in the backyard.
There is a section of the garden along the fence, the one where I dug the graves for the movie, that has never been planted. I basically took the hole that was already there and deepened and enlarged it, pulling out all of these rocks and bricks. Cynthia said that it was like there was house buried under there, like our backyard was Pompeii.
Molly stood on the Happy Porch, the porch that overhangs the garden, and watched as we put him, wrapped in the brown towel, into the hole and filled it in. I didn't want to put him in, I wanted to keep petting his head, I wanted to keep holding him, but I knew that the longer I waited, the harder it would be.
So, the hole was filled in and we put the stones on top of it and I took the cross that was still there with the other headstones from the movie and put it there to mark the spot. I'll make something permanent later.
We stood there when it was done and I said, we can never move now. Cynthia said, "Well, Fran and I had always decided that they were going to have to carry us out feet first," and I answered, "Yeah, but I didn't expect that I would have to stay here forever as well!"
It's hard to think of him in the ground like that, all alone, but he always loved being in the backyard, he was always the first at the door when I was letting them out, so when it's spring and I let the cats out for the first time that year, he will already be there waiting for them.
Milo, Elvis and Baldrick, circa 1993, sent to me by my ex-roommate, Marian, who wrote that Milo was always her favourite, too.
Today's horoscope:
You swing between giving up and pushing too hard in a relationship. Aim for realism and meet in the middle with others.
One year ago today:
"You'll only see ten blocks of New York," I said to Patrick, "But you'll see them several times!"
* Yesterday / Index / This Month / Tomorrow *
Graphics by the ever-reliably wonderful Saundra!
This page was written by hand. My hand. Only
pussies use HTML editors.
Last Updated Fri 23 February 10:05:09 2001