Right and stupid

They tell me to expect a broken leg. A broken leg bone is more likely than not. Learn to make a spoon splint, says one expert. These dogs think they can fly.

I consider our spoons. I lost a number of teaspoons during my marriage. They drowned in milky pools in the bottom of ice cream cartons, slipped out of sight and were discarded--baby with the bathwater, the way many marriages seem to go. Tablespoons now outnumber teaspoons roughly 2-1. I think of the Flying Dog, not even five pounds of canine. I imagine her bones, slight as plastic straws. Read up on butter knife splints, I think.

*****

While I sleep, the greedy house binges on the last drops of another trough of oil. It belches and the pipes go still. I don't realize what has happened until the flying dog wakes us at 4 am, crying piteously. Although I know I am not supposed to, I go to her, descending the stairs to her ladylike crate beside her elderly companion Sir James, who slumbers on his pile of blankets. The air is thick and cold. I scoop up the shivering puppy with one hand and tuck her into my robe. I touch a copper pipe. Nothing. I'm sorry, I say to her. Sometimes the house gets away from me. Sometimes it all gets away from me. The road to hell and all that.

Her DNA is not of the judging variety. Cradled in my arm, inside the robe, she contentedly buries her nose in my armpit. All is well again, for her, just like that. 

I carefully pick my way down the cellar stairs with the Flying Dog in my armpit. I check the oil tank. It seems like just last week that we had an oil delivery. Lose an 'e' and you can spell 'devilry" from 'delivery,' I think. The gauge on top of the monstrous tank tells me what I already know: empty. 

Immediately I think of the Everybody and Everyone. If I tell of this, the Everybody and Everyone will say, See? How she is?

Yes. This is sometimes how I am. Doesn't matter if sometimes you are something else, something quite wonderful. This is not what will make the news, not ever.

*****

I am nauseous with grief, that word forbidden to those not caught up in a death. I gag. I heave. My chest burns, here, here, and here. 

The ring is antique gold, from England, with a comet fashioned from two tiny mine cut diamonds. I was happy to find it, because love is happy to find objects that speak better than words. I was not sitting too far away, I was not running away, I was never obligated. I was there and so glad to be there and then nothing I said mattered, because it was all happening too fast and too loud and too wrong. Baby with the bathwater, spoons lost. 

And now, the ache begins.

With death, all is fair, and you can use any word you like. I envy widows, widowers. Gone. Rewrite the story if you need. The one left behind is granted this. Go on however you wish.

With space, distance, uncertainty, ambivalence, fear, anger, ways parted, divided loyalties, the ugly fraught unnecessities, the loss...

(and for how long? forever? six months? ten years?)

you'd best keep your grief on the down low.

If no one has died, if there's no body but your own numbness, you'll have to shoplift grief when no one is looking, stuff it down deep in your pockets. Frown and nod as polite society encourages co-opting a different noun—can we interest you in a smaller, more modest hole of a word?

Sadness is the suggested, go-to word, but it just won't do. Some of you know. It just won't.

*****

In the glittering dark, I slurp my cherry Icee. When Anne Hathaway sings, 

But the tigers come at night / With their voices soft as thunder

I begin crying. No one will hold Fantine close again, not that way. She will never see her daughter, Cosette, again.

My daughter, on the other hand, sits to my left, sharing my popcorn. I try not to shake, to make wet mewling noises. What is so bad, after all? I have enough. To someone, having a daughter to share popcorn with at the movies would be enough. It is all enough, or should be.

But still, the tigers. I know about the tigers. There are males and females and they do what she says they do. The dreams turn to shame.

*****

The Flying Dog, rescued from vile innkeepers (or say they were), will be Isabella Cosette, and she is welcome to any of my cutlery: teaspoons, tablespoons, forks, knives. I stroke her satin skin and paper-thin ears, traced with fine red capillaries. Her tail has a lump, possibly a break from her brief time in her litter in Purdy, Missouri, puppy mill capital of the South.

I did this thing. I brought her home, because it was right. Right and stupid can co-exist, I learn all the time, the way of the necessary fool. I set her down and dig my knuckles into my eyes, my fingers smelling faintly of puppy poo and buttered popcorn. Some things, I can make right. Some things, I can't find my way. 

*****

I wake up warmer but wishing for death. It is an old habit, and old habits only die hard if you flog them, which seems too cruel a way of going about it. I am cursing at the sun again, never a good sign. I wanted to be away, to have a chance to settle, to calm myself, to think things through, but somehow this is not what happened. I hate each fucking day again, despise the need to raise my gaze from the floor. Each thing I see tells me something I do not want to know, to hear.

There is no such thing as being right and smart. Right and stupid: that's the only pairing up for grabs at this time.

New Year's Eve

Breathe.

Two lungs inflate, then release
what no one but you can see.
The exhale is wet crimson chiffon,
tattered, tugged by the 
clown-turned-sword-swallower-turned-
scarf-swallower. Ta-da. Ta-da! 
Hold your applause. 

This is how it begins. Open another bottle
of wine, stroke a furred head, take it slow.

This is the way, on this night
of violent sky
with angry glitter and sound unfit
for the little ones, who know better.

Meanwhile, the nighttime sky braces itself
and peels away from the Earth, preparing 
to be torn by unwelcome, unnatural
light. The dark has no say in the matter, 
not on this night. Pray for it, a little.

You, on the other hand:
Do what you must and grieve
for whatever it is that you
have just lost, even though
you cannot speak it aloud.

You know lost.
You will be in bed by ten, 
this time. Who is to say this 
is not for the best? 



Safer, never safe

I like the open spaces here. I like them, but I don't trust them. I never feel safe, exactly. Who says the clouds won't fall? Look how heavy they look, after all. And who says there isn't someone in the brush off to the left, watching? Who says there isn't someone behind me, behind the fence and its NO TRESPASSING sign, waiting? 

Still, I feel safer here than I did in the city. I have my red dog—my second red dog, what are the odds—and she stays close. You can't say that about everyone. I firmly reject the metaphor "the black dog of depression." The dogs are the only antidote to the shadows always lurking in the periphery of this thing of mine, this thing best referred to as a life, until it becomes a death. The dogs—their fur, vomit, urine, feces—I will always choose them over a clean house. I am grateful that they choose me back. This is the closest I will come to "safe."

It is what it is

The key to life, I have been told, is to take nothing personally. This is a problem if you are someone who takes things personally.

If you do not take things personally, there is also a 74% chance that you are someone who says

it is what it is

without irony. If you are one of that 74%, there is then an 89% chance that you may also find yourself saying that you have

a very full plate right now

If so, congratulations. You are born robust and thick-skinned by nature. It may be time for you to get a tattoo, to celebrate this fact. If you have been searching for a reason to get inked, there is a 98% likelihood that this is it.

As indicated in Figure 14

As indicated in Figure 14, nonlonely participants showed greater activity in the ventral striatum, one of the brain's 'reward centers,' when they saw a pleasant image of a person (a smiling farmer) than when they saw an equally pleasant picture of an object (a flower arrangement). For the nonlonely, a positive image of another human being obviously meant something special—it gave them a specific emotional boost....
Lonely participants, however, when they viewed positive images of people, did not register the same boost.  —Loneliness, Cacioppo & Patrick

I would mix curry powder and plain yogurt in this kitchen

...at this very point on the map. Then I would pour the stained yogurt over boiled vegetables and wonder why it did not taste very good.

In case you were wondering: This is not, in fact, the way to make a curry.

I learned this the hard way in Northeast Minneapolis, in the first-floor apartment that was bone-cuttingly cold in the winter, in the kitchen beside the hall to the bedroom where I used my maternal grandmother's dresser mirror as a headboard, where I could see my breath on January mornings.

Two blocks away: Emily's Lebanese Deli, land of Middle Eastern delights. On the spring day my dog almost choked to death on a stick in a NE Minneapolis park, he and I stopped at Emily's on the way home for a quart of tabouli. We ate it on the front porch, exhausted by our battle with death (oh okay just this once fine you can keep the dog for now). My dog gobbled his tabouli from a floral Corelle bowl at my feet. I ate mine out of the container with a nicked fork I held with shaking fingers.

When I left Minneapolis for grad school in Westchester County, New York, my friends Heather and Lindsay would sometimes send me Emily's tabouli and pita. How they did this, I do not know. These were the days before mail-order and Internet and websites. Magically, the tabouli found its way to me, fresh and cold, in a cardboard box.

There are things we will never understand, in retrospect.