If it wasn’t enough that I haven’t been feeling well inside-out and have been swimming in a pool of sheer fucking depression since Thursday, I found my kitten dead this morning at the neighbor’s door. He had this small, shallow cut on the side of his belly. The blood has dried out. I closed his eyes, started to dig deep into an empty pot outside the house. I wiped my tears with my arms, catching up with how quick they fall one after another.
People sometimes find it funny how much I care for cats I just picked up scavenging in garbage dumps. Put it in a bag, throw it, away. It’s just a cat, they say. But I love my cats. I don’t care what they think.I treat them like my own kids. If my mother wouldn’t kick me out of the house I’d let them stay inside.
Halfway through sleep last night I heard an angry dog fighting off something outside the house. You know, that sound a dog makes when he doesn’t know you, and wants to intimidate you and bite your leg out. And I just got that feeling, you know, that feeling that something’s wrong. A jolt. Woman’s intuition. But I didn’t get up from bed, I stayed asleep. I have been so depressed these past few days even making myself take a bath seems like a chore.
And now, I know. It has been my fault.
I play Jimmy Eat World’s 23 over and over again as I type this. The song even depresses the hell out of me more but I just let it; I don’t find peace by avoiding the smarting chaos of my own life. Yes, I’m punishing myself so sue me.
I leafed through White Oleander the other day. It was the part where Claire killed herself. “A diamond with a dead spot in the middle”. I may have read that chapter ten times already, the same rate I did the other ones. The line reverberated in my head back and forth. I remember sitting outside the review class yesterday, smoking amidst throngs of people and busy cars and jeepneys with horns honking alternately, ceaselessly. A lotto outlet read “JACKPOT:26M”. A man stood across me with tattoos covering the length of his two arms and neck, some sort of riddle, I imagine. It was the longest four minutes of my life. Everything just came off muffled, an incomprehensible blur, even the sound of air trying to squeeze in my ears. Like how it goes in the movies and everything’s in a slow motion and someone’s there at the center but not really, because her senses are closed momentarily. I didn’t wait or hope for anything. I just sat there staring languidly into the streets, and I wake up only when the cigarette signals it’s burning near my fingers.
He’s been texting and I know he’s worried. But let’s not go there, dear. Let’s not go an inch near there. There where I have to hurt to smile, so I can satisfy, so we can talk about what you had for lunch or your fixation to a new possession. I am not fine. Very far from it. Outside it looks just that but there is something wrong all the way inside. There is that dead spot, can you see? I have it, only I can understand, it’s not something you or any one of your diversions could solve. I don’t want to join in diverting the cause anymore. Because I’m aware when I am compelled to forget with you this will just be one of those things that will regurgitate from the abandoned well of my memory when I hurt so gravely as now. It will peel back for me, that waste unresolved, that I might be able to rise above it and I’d come dragging people like you into this no matter how unintentionally. So let’s just not,dear. Please.
Forgive me, I hurt so.
Wawa naman miming