The dogs are playing a silly game under the deck, popping their heads out at one another and barking, growling, like little soil-covered trolls. I want to muster up some scolding for them - they're filthy, they're teasing one another and snarling and snapping,they've dug a crevasse where there once was straight lawn - but I know it's an outpouring of energy from being left all day, and it all seems in good fun, so I let it go.
Robins are calling in the trees above the yard so I watch them, rotating through the branches, and wonder, like the dogs, what sort of conversation they are having. I note, also, that somewhere in my life, I learned to differentiate the calls from a robin among those of other birds, and I feel a very vague, very small sense of accomplishment for this small bit of knowledge.
I drink my Michigan wine which tastes very much like grape juice, but I live in wine country now and I want to adapt, and I let the sun slowly move downward. Now and then I get up from the deck and pick up old cigarette butts the previous homeowner cast aside, soft and feathered with age. I've been doing this for months now- they seem to burrow up from the earth as spring comes like buds.
Lucy is in a strange mood, and I wonder if Ryan has set her off. I think she is cured, I have fixed her, until I see her interact with others. She bites at me as I bend, too calm and tired to be angry with her, and, deftly, I watch her moving like I would watch a fly landing on me - hand moves and I snatch her scruff in my hands and flip her onto her back. I sit on her body until her frantic tail calms and the spell has passed, and I return her to the yard, herself again.
What a strange life.
I sit upstairs alone, a kitten down my shirt, its tiny tiny ill voicebox the softest rumbling purr against my skin. Her face is caked with milk and food, crusty and hard; I pick hard pieces of the fur around her eyes where infection has oozed. She is strong today, and comfortable against me, and she's calming me, whether I know it just then or not. I look down at her small closed eyes and my chest wants to swell, but I won't quite let it. I think of all the beautiful little kittens I have loved, who have lain on me just so, who died unexpectedly, or expectedly. I will give it time, and a little piece of love, and see how it progresses, before I let my heart open all the way.
He seems to understand. I am opening up, a little piece at a time, about myself and how I feel, and I am relieved when he doesn't pull away from it.
I am the coldest person in a room of melted ice cream people.
How have I become cold? Or am I just feeling cold by comparison?
And someone, always, must be that person, right? Someone with a mush heart must still make the hard choices.
I remind myself, looking down at the small breathing thing comforted by my heartbeat, curled against me, reliant on me for food and warmth and care, that I may feel so, but I am not cold.
He reminds me that I am not cold. And I admit, it feels good to hear. But part of me says, he is new. Maybe, over time, he will decide that I am cold after all.
As Dorian said.
But Dorian made me cold. Never, before him, were things so black and white in my life. He has changed my perspective. I am not, and I do not think I will ever be again, so forgiving as I was.
The kitten wakes and crawls back to her siblings, and I sit on the floor beside my bed and wonder with a little bit of fear, just who I am now.
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