Waiting

Every inch of me is tense.  Uncontrollably, I hold my breath.  I am waiting for this year’s catastrophe.

January 6th is my own Pearl Harbor Day.  It is my day that will live in infamy.  It is the day that for the past three years has heralded a month of tears and grief.

It is 3:30 in the morning on January 6, 2005.  Mark shakes me awake, “Something’s wrong with Spunky.”  
I look up at him, blearily.  “What?” Before he can answer a long ,mournful meow cuts into my heart.  It was Spunky, but it was not his voice.  I throw off the covers and hurry to the hallway.  He is pressing his forehead into a corner, straining against a wall that will not let him pass.  He stops a moment and stands there, panting, blindly weaving his head back and forth.  My heart sinks.
We settle him as best we can on the bed, keeping physical contact with him as much as possible.  This seems to have a calming affect.  The minute one of us stops touching him he starts thrashing and crying.
The hours creep by.  The vet office doesn’t open until nine; I have an early morning orientation meeting that I have to be at.  We agree that I will take care of the meeting and Mark will call the vet to get an appointment.
Mechanically, I get through the meeting.  Mark calls me to tell me that we can bring him in as soon as we can.  I return home and we silently drive to the vet’s office, Spunky lying prone in the bottom half of the carrier that we lined with blankets.
We walk up to reception, where I am preparing to fill out the paperwork they always require.  The receptionist takes one look at the three of us and ushers us into an exam room and takes Spunky back to see the doctor.  I feel my face crumpling.  After years of being the usher, the giver of sympathetic looks, I am the usheree, the grieving owner.  The tears I had been holding back for hours come and I weep uncontrollably.  The doctor comes into the room.  Spunky’s new, strange meow follows her.  “There’s nothing we can do for him.  He’s disoriented, he can’t see.  He’s probably had a stroke.”  Our eyes meet.  I know what I must do.  “We’ll put a catheter in his leg and then I’ll bring him in.  You can stay here as long as you like.  When you’re ready, just let the receptionist know, and we’ll take care of him.  Go ahead and check out now while we’re placing the catheter.”
I knew what to expect.  I knew the dizzying array of options available for pet remains.  I couldn’t afford any of them but the basic disposal.  “Please don’t send him to a rendering plant,” I plead.  “I don’t want him turned into soap.”
“No, he’ll just be cremated with other animals.”
I sign the slip, and go back into the room.  Spunky had returned and Mark was weeping over him.  “You were such a good cat.”
When the serum had been injected and we could finally stop crying long enough to leave, we walked out to the car and returned home.  I crawled into bed.  I had joined the ranks of pet owners who had had to make the difficult decision to let their companion die with dignity.  As I wept inconsolably over the loss of my beautiful friend, I was thankful that he had made it so easy for me.  He was not the cat of the day before, he was obviously uncomfortable.  He allowed me the only logical choice.

It is 11:30, January 6, 2006.  I am working at my desk wishing the twinge of headache I’d been experiencing all day would go away.  Mark walks into my office, pulls up a chair, and sits down.
“Mark found me a job offer down in LA and I’ve decided to take it.  I’ll be moving out by the end of the month.”
I look at him, and then, suddenly, I can’t.  I return to the data entry I had been working on.  “Don’t you love me anymore?” I ask.  I start hiccuping as tears start to fall and I clench down to keep the sob that wants to escape imprisoned.
“I’m moving out.”  He gets up and leaves.
I stand up and run to the bathroom, where I throw up and then collapse onto the floor, trying to keep the sobs as quiet as possible.  When I feel like I can control myself again, I splash water on my face and walk into the vice-president’s office.  “I don’t feel well.  May I go home?”
He looks up.  “Since you look like you’re going to puke on my desk right now, yes.”
Tears well up in my eyes again, and I flee.  I drop bus fare on Mark’s desk, and leave.  I make it to my car, barely, before the tears fall again.  I cry the entire way home.  When I get home, I crawl into bed.
When he gets home, I am eating dinner.  “I want you out by my birthday.”
He looks at me.  “I’ll try, but I can’t make any guarantees.”

It is 5:30, January 6th, 2006.  I am on my way home, and call my dad to schedule my next visit to Arizona.  “I’m thinking the second weekend in Feburary,” I tell him.
There’s a silence on the other end.  “Is that okay?” I ask.
“Well, you know Grandma’s not been feeling well.”
“Yes.”
“Well, she finally went to the doctor to get some new medications, and he found a tumor.  It’s an end-of-life-situation.”
I go numb.  I concentrate very hard on not crashing into the car in front of me.  “How long?” I finally ask.
“Well, it’s hard to say.  But, I’m not sure what you’ll find by the middle of February.”
“Okay, I’ll relook at a calendar when I get home.”
“Sooner would be better than later, I think.”

So, yes, I’m a bit paranoid about this day.  I count down the hours until we’ve silently slipped into January 7th.  4 1/2 hours to go and counting….

January

I am not a resolution person,  mainly because I never keep them.  I do like the idea of having a clean slate with a new year and using that as a launchpad for self betterment.  But then what happens when the resolve waivers or is broken? Do you then start to slide down the slippery slope of self-criticism to self-loathing? Do you shrug it off? But if it was so easy to shrug off, what was the point of making the resolution to begin with?

No.  New Year’s resolutions are not for me.  This is not to say that I think that I’m perfect.  If you’ve read this blog at all, you realize that I don’t think THAT about myself.  I just think that if you’re going to make a resolution, do it in the here and now.  I will practice more, STARTING TODAY; I will be nicer to my coworkers, STARTING TODAY; I will eat a piece of fruit with every meal, STARTING TODAY.  These are all things that could (and should) be started at whatever date the idea pops into the brain; they don’t need to wait until January 1 to take effect.  They’re not cartons of milk; they won’t curdle into a disgusting slime the consistency of cat puke.  I will stop procrastinating…but I’ll wait until New Year’s Day before I do.

In my relatively recent history, January has not been a good month.  Three years ago, I lost my first cat in January.  The following year, Mark left.  Last year I lost my grandmother.  So, if I were to make any sort of “resolution” it would be more of a plea to the cosmic powers: please let me get through this month without some major tragedy.  I would like to spend this month, the first full month of winter, enjoying the pale sunlight and the rainstorms.  I want to look for the first daffodils and narcissus to bloom.  I want to feel anticipation for my birthday, which three years ago was barely celebrated, two years ago was an escape mechanism, and last year was a don’t bother (we entombed my grandmother’s ashes the day before…no one really felt like celebrating).  I do not want to cry this month.  I do not want to have any “come now” phone calls.  I do not want my heart to break.  I do not want my world upended.

I would like a January that is utterly forgettable.

7 things…plus what I really meant to write about

So, I’ve been tagged.  Thank you, Yolanda  for forcing me to be extra revealing. 

So, seven things…

1. I opted to not purchase an amazingly priced custom made flute because I was afraid that it would make my playing sound so much better compared to what I can do on my faithful Armstrong (that every single technician has stuck their nose up at),that I would REALLY (rather than only really) regret only minoring in music.

2. I am very good at starting projects.  Finishing them, on the other hand…

3. I was date raped when I was sixteen.  I refused to deal with it until my last couple years at college.  During a group project for an English class, I was the only female in a group of three.  We held one of our meetings in one of the practice rooms in the music department (all the study rooms in the library were full), and I realized that I spent the entire hour trying to wedge myself behind the piano.  I walked into the counseling office that afternoon.

4. I live less than a hundred miles from my mom and probably about 800 from my dad.  I see both parents about the same number of times a year (about 2).

5.  I have a hopelessly romantic view of love/falling in love.  To this day, my greatest fantasy is to have a guy see me dance or hear me play and have to get to know me.  I know, it’s like something out of a cheap romance novel. 

6. I have a BS in Animal Science and Management.  I run the accounting office for a solar contractor, which has no call for the sheep flipping I learned my freshman year.

7.  I was the first child in my class to have divorced parents.

I don’t know seven people with blogs to pass this on to.  Yolanda is my only blogging buddy

Okay, so now that that’s over with…

Go to Yolanda’s blog, and read the essay she linked to  (The Erotic Appeal of Lands’ End), if you haven’t already.

Since I read that post this afternoon, I have not been able to get it out of my brain.  First of all, while I intuitively understand that guys must go through heartbreak just like us gals, I have never been allowed into the inner psyche of a guy to have a good idea of what he goes through.  The author has sort of adopted this love/hate relationship with these catalogs because they remind him of his departed love.  The bizarre, or maybe timely, thing is that I’ve been experiencing something similar with missing items.

Mark and I lived together for almost six years.  Anyone who has lived with a significant other understands that your stuff will get mixed together.  Our situation was somewhat intensified because Mark had SO MUCH stuff that a CD of mine would get mixed in on a road trip, and never see the light of day again.

I am currently living in dread fear of the CD cabinet.  For the last few months I have been discovering lost gems from my collection. Some I can name: Trout Fishing Big Trouble, James Galway’s Christmas album (wtf?? he didn’t even like Christmas music), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat(again, wtf??), Paula Cole’s first album.  Some I have no hope of naming, though I can picture their album covers perfectly.  One of the things Mark was brilliant at was finding albums that I really, really loved, and they were always by these little nobodies.  I couldn’t begin to name names or titles.  They have, like my dictionary, vanished into the great black hole that was my relationship.

So, I discover that an item is missing.  I am peeved.  “He had no right to take that,” I fume.  And then I mourn its loss, and with it the loss of what I had so desperately wanted to be a lifelong love.  Because, just like the CD, it has disappeared, and I must live with a new hole in my life.