Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Update

It's been a while since I've posted, an event I have been strangely dreading in recent days, as if some kind of bogart. Since I last posted, mom has broken her leg, I have taken care of her, I've admitted that I have nearly crippling depression and started taking antidepressants, Christmas has come and gone, and I've started working at Target.

And Indy has died.

I think I have been dreading writing anything, whether fiction or journaling, out of some contrary feet-dragging tendency on my part, a fear that, if I rush forward, I will trip over myself and fall all over again. It's hard to describe, since it's an impulse rooted in the truly murky depths of my nature. Since I have been on antidepressants, I have, I feel, been coming out of my shell, and returning to some semblance of routine and contentment, but I have been afraid of rushing into old activities. I want to move slowly. I don't want to overtax myself. And in the time that I have taken off from many activities, they have grown into looming giants in my mind's eye, unconquerable living mountains that I dare not face nor climb, but turn away from, wishing to think of other things. There is a degree of performance anxiety. Anytime I talk to anyone on the phone, they ask my if I am writing anything yet, and I always have to disappointingly tell them "no." I haven't even written in notebooks. I have been putting off all writing. Writing, like drumming, is something I both love and fear. doing it well, or at least what I perceive as well, elicits the greatest feeling in the world, a kind of artistic apotheosis, glory in a act done well. But doing it poorly, directionlessly, insipidly, feels like a deep betrayal, an act of sacrilege. So put if off, and it's shadow grows longer, slowly, inexorably following me like a glacier. I have long known that the only way to banish this shadow is to do some bit of writing, any writing, just to break the ice.

But I have put that off, any thought about other things. I have been reading a lot, a lot about King Arthur. I have about half through La Morte d'Arthur, and about three quarters through History of the Kings of Britain. I got close to writing recently, working out an timeline of events for a version of the Arthurian cycle as a kind of game with myself, to create my own version of the mythos, and it felt nice to do some kind of doodle.

But I just got done reading Mary's post about Indy dying, and I just felt like writing something. The ice broke for some reason, some alchemy of the soul. It doesn't feel frightening anymore.

I don't really have to much to say about it, at least not directly. Indy is kind of a vast topic for me. I feel like I am supposed to Eulogize him, make some definitive statement about him, and my relationship to him. A summation. But I just don't have that in me right now. Besides, Eulogies stink of artifice, and artifice has no place in mourning.

I do have a couple of random thoughts that keep popping up. One is that He was probably the pet that I have been closest to in my life. Moreso than Sheeba or Mittens, though I miss them too. The second is a kind of collective memory of when Indy was a kitten, he would come into my room at night, when I still have a waterbed, and I would move my legs around under the covers, and he would leap after them. I would giggle, and see how much of a fury I could work him up into. The third is the way he would sometimes pose while sitting, or standing, with his back arched, his paws in front, and his chest puffed out. He looked like an Egyptian statue, so regal and proper. I thought it was hilarious that anything could be at rest in such a state. I wonder what was running though his head while doing that. The fourth is his loud, loud purr, the loudest of any cat I know of. It was like a motorcycle. The fifth was the nuzzle, that adorable nuzzle, when you were petting him, and he was really content, and he would stick his face down in a crook. Every time he did it, it was too cute to bear, I felt like I was overdosing on cuteness. When Mary got to the part in her post, where he did it, for the last time, and I knew, reading it, that it was really that last time, that he ever did that, to anyone, I teared up and sobbed. Oh Indy.

That's it for right now. There is something else I want to talk about, but I think I will save it for it's own post. And I haven't even touched on the seventh anniversary yet. But right now, I need to stop. God, I miss them.