11.07.10 1:47 am

i miss this space. i miss writing. i miss the olden days of dland and the bubble of writers that created and vented and poured beauty life in here. they made me want to continue writing, to live a life worth writing about. and then that life got in the way of writing and the writing just stopped. funny how that happens.

a year ago, shortly after i wrote the last (yet another) morose entry, a lot of life happened in a very short time.

within the span of those next 3 months:
i bought a house
i said goodbye to my fur soulmate alphonse
i worked on updating and repairing this little 50's rambler with the help of an awesome contractor, my mother, and my amazing friends.
i grappled with becoming the victim of a home robbery while away at work, done by kids who completely ransacked my new little house and dumped everything i owned inside out
i ran away to mazatlan for 8 days
i shut down

after those first crazy months, i went into major cocoonage and just tried to recover from life turning completely upside down. in what seemed like minutes i found myself completely alone in a house i felt too inadequate and unknowledgeable to manage. no shared walls or comfort cat or sounds of any life other than my own breathing and the creak of the giant evergreens outside my window. sleep at first was impossible here. i felt equal parts dazed, grief-stricken, and excited. but mostly i just felt suffocating isolation.

i wasn't looking to buy a house. but i found myself taking those steps when the house across the street from my dear friends/old roommate went up for sale. i liken the feeling of going through the home-buying process to how i felt when i bought a lift ticket committing myself to the first and only attempt at skiing: blindnumbing numbness of numbinosity. (and yeah, i broke both legs in the Ski Debacle 2000, so the familiar feeling had a tinge of foreboding to it).

it came down to this: the price was right, the circumstances were right, the location was right. i had to at least make the attempt.

here's what i wasn't expecting as i went through this process: utter and profound grief of mammoth proportions. i had no idea the magnitude of crapbaggage i had been dragging around with me for so many years, but i came squarely face to face with it the night i signed the paperwork to make an offer on the house.

the fact that i made an offer on the house on the anniversary of my failed marriage did not go unnoticed. especially when every page i signed stated "an unmarried individual" next to my name. once i got home, and for every night after that for at least a week or two, i found myself crying sobbing up a storm, and i could not for the life of me figure out what the hell was going on. until i finally found myself saying to a friend "i've been holding out for a partner before taking this big step forward in my life".

and then it just came rushing over me, how long and how much have i been holding back in my life waiting for "the one" to come along... and then immediately after that, the nauseating feeling that taking this step forward without a partner was to acknowledge that i might never find a partner - and then this absolute flood of wicked grief. there was some pretty twisted logic in there that had grown and festered and taken root throughout me for so many years, to wrench it out was just physically exhausting.

but once i could put a finger on what was happening to me, it made it much more bearable. enlightening even. (wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to take a clarity pill and flush out the fucking deadweight baggage? if i could just be the observant passenger and not the conductor/architect of this life it would be so much more relaxing. and entertaining. and frustrating. ok so maybe not relaxing. can i just observe someone else's life? i would prefer that).

and then right on the heels of this epiphanic meltdown, i had to turn right around and face the fact that alphonse, my little feline fur companion of 12 years was dying. after so many tests and needles and different gadgets to get him to eat and recover his decreasing body weight over the past few months, we discovered that in addition to renal failure he had lymphoma and there was no treating the two together. shortly after that, little dude had taken to living in my cool dark closet.

jesus i can't even write about this yet, i'm starting to sob. i cannot believe how much pain i still feel missing his little warm body and giant precocious presence in my life. every night for twelve years he'd curl into me and rest his warm purr furriness over my arm, the healing comfort cure-all to even my most toxic assholian days. his companionship outlasted my marriage, other failed relationships, was steadfast through many moves and heartbreaks and goofy goodness. i was so blessed to have this inseparable connection to another being. and as grateful as i am for that, i'm not sure i'll ever be able to stop crying for him. for us. the alphonse well of emotion runs ridiculously deep still a year later.

so for now (and half a box of tissue later), i will just type this: saying goodbye to him, standing over him alone in a small white room sing/crying to him as his purr heart stopped, resisting the urge to climb in with him... was by far the hardest experience of my life.

so yeah. jesus.

whew. i've known that i needed to write this all out for some time, but it's taken me a year to get here.

but at least i'm here.