Tag Archives: loss

Quotation of the Week

Word Wednesday 9/2/2015

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Only after we've lost everything are we

Just a couple of days before Katrina hit, a friend and I were riding around Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.  On the marquee for either St. Stanislaus school or Our Lady Academy–both private religious school–was this quotation.

I took a picture of it because:

  1. I thought it strange that a religious school would be quoting Fight Club,
  2. Fight Club is one of my favorite movies, ever,
  3.  and I had a disposable camera and needed to use up the shots.  Little did I know that the shots of bridges, beaches, and some of my favorite trees would be the last I would see of them for months or years or ever.

As Doctor Horrible would say, what a crazy random happenstance.

Cat, Grieving, Jitterbug

Jitterbug Blues

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jitterbug

As I write this, I am taking a break. There is only so much search-and-rescue one can do without taking a break when one possesses joints the size of baseballs.

I’m grieving, and I haven’t even seen her yet. She’s there, somewhere in the house, her silence so very loud in my head. She was a mouthy one, that one, especially as the dementia crept over her, draping her in continual confusion, a fact she quite often vocally advertised.

The silence is so very, very loud.

She’s missed three meals; she’s never been a girl who would miss a meal. Despite the fogginess that surrounded her, she could never ignore the sound of a cat food can cracking open, its aluminum rim squeaking as the tab freed that nasty meat-like product.

When I called her, she’d holla back in her best Edith-Bunker voice, telling me she was pissed and that I needed to come. Come now. Bring your hair. I need to drool. Now.  Bring the food. Now. I need to eat. Now. Leave the dog. Dumbass. Now.

May would have been 17 years with her; over one-third of my life. Forty-point 46341463414634 per cent of my life.

Is that an irrational number? Hell, I don’t even know, but it would be fitting.  She never was that rational.

She wasn’t particularly beloved; I joked that the only reason I kept her around was because she had tenure. I know a lot of people don’t get cats. I am not sure that I particularly get cats. But I did get her.

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musing

Scream Worthy

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So I went walking this evening. I needed to get some of this frustration out. I needed to get some of this panic and anger and utter disappointment out.

I needed to move, and I needed to move fast. I went to the park; there is something very calming (and relevant) about walking in circles around a track that has honeysuckle and various fragrant flowers along the path.

I got maybe — maybe — 20 minutes in, if I was lucky.  I was first stopped by the sight of a man showing his daughter how to drink honeysuckle. She was maybe five. This was a big deal, and he taught her with all the seriousness of an esoteric lesson.  I had to walk around bikes strewn along the track. Apparently everyone in the city decided to ride their bikes (or at least throw them down along the walking track) today for some reason.

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relationships

Words, words, words

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Meh.

I wrote something once, “Words will be the death of me, and in Truth I shall be reborn.”

I think it’s fitting…the difference between words and truth these days, or, perhaps more accurately, Truth these days, is astounding.

We’re talking about style in ficiton writing class last night. What’s style? Out of all of the elements of fiction, I think style is the most difficult to define. It’s more than grammar or syntax. More than mere word choice. But it has little to do with storyline or plot or even character, I think.

If you find that one writer that just zings off the page, it doesn’t matter if he or she rewrites a nursery rhyme or a short story — her style is there, and you know who wrote it.

Mark over at the Naked Soul wrote this post about fingerprints, and it made me think. It made me think that style and fingerprints in that sense, aren’t really all that different.

But back to words.

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relationships, semester break

And So it Goes

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I knew 2008 would be a year of loss. Of “positive” loss, I thought.
I just didn’t know it would be this sort of loss, or of this magnitude.

They say you find out who your friends are when times are bad, not good.

When I hit bottom on Wednesday, and I was at my absolute worst, I was lectured by a Carpe Diem girl. While I cried (and, oh, did I cry, knowing the whole time that one cigarette of hers — which she had been smoking around me — would have made it better), she lectured me on what a shitty person I am.

She then left me stranded: all of my stuff’s in bags and boxes and my rooms are filled with organizational stuff that I have no idea how to implement. I can’t find my socks. I can’t find my school supplies.

Hell, I can’t even find my brain right now.

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