dulcetly...notes on a bookish life

It's been a weird and rough week, one of those weeks where you try to distract yourself with just about everything you can (friends, work, food, alcohol, weird obsessions with nail polish and hair dye) and feel a little at the end of it like you've been put through a shredder.  I know I keep saying winter is hard, and winter is always hard, but this week, in addition to the usual malaise, I lost my other older kitty to illness.  At first I didn't want to talk about it.  Perhaps I still don't want to talk about it.  In fact, hesitate to post this because I will keep seeing it here every time I look at the blog. Like something sad I will occasionally crash into when I am not looking to.   I have avoided mentioning it on FB precisely for that reason.   But in not talking about it at all, it somehow makes it sadder.

Mr Giles (as per his Buffy namesake) was sort of the big baby, a rather giantish and gentle grey striped mainecoon, the sort of cat who followed you around and expected to be held constantly, so his absence leaves a hole (any pet loss leaves a hole, but this one I notice at every turn--how he's not nuzzling my face in the middle of the night, trying to lie in the space between my body and the laptop, not rolling around on the floor when I get home, coming even when I'm calling one of the other cats.)

I know things only get worse as you go along--the longer you are alive, the more you will lose.  So many pets, thankfully all after pretty long and happy lives, have passed through my childhood and adolescence and adulthood.  In addition to a slew of childhood pets that died after I'd moved away, I myself have lost three to age in the last 10 years.   It doesn't get easier..and every single time you have these crazy thoughts, like how you should give ALL of them away so you don't ever have to deal with their loss, or that maybe this is why people have children, so that something, at least, outlives them when everything else is all about losing (not that this fact alone would induce me to childbearing, mind you, but something to consider).  The more pets you bring into your life, the more you will lose, and this seems unfair somehow.  All the rest are much younger, the gingers only 6, Max barely 2, and Zelda not even a year, so hopefully *knock on wood* I'll get a break from it, but it doesn't make it easier.

So I put one foot in front of the other, try to get through one day with distractions and then one more.  I go to work on my off days to keep myself talking to others and not doing that thing in my head where I constantly chase my tail.  I plan my trip west and dye my hair umpteen times and try not to hit the bad spots I feel lurking under everyday, the dark little pools that threaten to swallow me if I step too close.  I am trying to say fuck you to January and good riddance...There are only 40-something days til spring and I'll be counting every one.